Through the Improving Learning Outcomes for Asia (ILOA) project, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)/Pakistan engaged RTI International to conduct an assessment of the basic education sector in Pakistan. This brief summarizes the findings from the final report, which integrates data to provide an overview of basic education in Pakistan at the federal level and in five provinces and regions: Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), Balochistan, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Punjab, and Sindh. The report focuses on the issues of inclusive education, climate resilience, and private schooling.

The rapidly changing climate is a threat that sees no borders and its impact on the education sector is severe. Yet, often in the wake of climate disasters, the education sector is widely overlooked and underfunded. The purpose of this group panel presentation is thus to explore different examples of research and programming which aim to improve the education sector’s resilience to the impacts of climate change. The panel is comprised of stakeholders from USAID and international educational research and implementing organizations from around the globe which have experience with how education systems can become more resilient to such disasters. This panel will draw from new global frameworks and strategies on climate resilience, as well as research and implementation examples from the case study of Pakistan, where unprecedented 2022 flooding severely impacted an already beleaguered education system. Further, the panel will explore the intersection of climate change impact and marginalized communities.

Through the Improving Learning Outcomes for Asia (ILOA) project, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)/Pakistan engaged RTI International to conduct an assessment of the basic education sector, in two phases. First, the team completed a desk review of available secondary data and relevant publications. Second, a team of researchers collected qualitative data through 84 key informant interviews, group discussions, and school visits in-country. This final report integrates data from both phases to provide an overview of basic education in Pakistan at the federal level and in five provinces and regions: Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), Balochistan, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Punjab, and Sindh. In addition to an overview of basic education, the assessment probed the following issues: ● Private schooling – analysis of the extent and quality of private schooling, including the potential for expanded public–private partnerships (PPPs). ● Inclusive education – equity in access to schooling for marginalized and vulnerable populations, especially girls and children with disabilities ● Flood recovery and climate resilience – the education system’s recovery from the recent flooding and lessons from those incidents regarding the role that basic education can play in climate change mitigation and adaptation and the longer-term resiliency of the education system

The purpose of this formal group panel presentation is to hold an in-depth discussion on USAID’s investments into system strengthening across Asia over the past decade and how these efforts are situated within the broader global move to focus more intentionally and coherently on education system strengthening. The panel will discuss a 2022 empirical research study (the USAID System Strengthening Review, hereafter “the Review”) conducted by two international research organizations for the USAID Asia Bureau which reviews USAID system strengthening work in 11 Asian countries. This Review offers a qualitative evidence-based analysis relevant to the field of comparative and international education (CIE) and analyzes new data collected from a desk review of relevant project documents, reports, and evaluations, key informant interviews, multi-stakeholder survey, and three deep-dive case studies in Nepal, Cambodia, and the Philippines. The group panel will include three presentations on different aspects of the Review and include discussant commentary and critique to elicit group and audience discussion. The first panel presentation discusses a theoretical framework drawn from the RISE Programme (Pritchett 2015 and Spivak 2021) and recent analysis from the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education. The Review’s central research questions are guided by these broader global trends, as well as its own analysis framework developed specifically for this study, discussed in Presentation 3. Conclusions are drawn based on this framework, and the overall discussion in Presentations 2 and 3 considers the context of USAID programming in Asia and how new knowledge provides new insights.