A journal for the numbers Pakistan already collects
It has never been easier to study Pakistan with Pakistan's own data. What is still being built is the culture around it: evidence read closely, checked openly, and shared freely. Adaad exists to help build that culture by practising it in public. Every piece names its source, ships its data, and states what it could not establish.
Every figure carries the releasing agency and the release it came from. Where two official definitions of the same quantity exist, the piece says which one it is using.
The dataset behind a piece is downloadable on the same page, in the shape we analysed it. The download and the chart are built from the same data.
Where we compute something no agency publishes, it is labelled an Adaad estimate. The method, its limits and the code are published with it.
Where the data cannot answer the question, the piece says so rather than estimating around it.
Corrections appear on the story, dated, with the previous figure left legible. There is also a running corrections log.
Prose, charts and cleaned datasets are CC BY 4.0. Credit Adaad, link the source, and use them.
Why Adaad
ʿAdad (عدد) came into Urdu from Arabic, where it means a number, a quantity, a count. Behind it is the Semitic root ʿ-d-d, whose territory is counting, numbering and reckoning. Aʿdaad (اعداد) is the plural: the numbers. The root’s oldest sense is worth keeping. To count something is to reckon with it: to decide, one by one, what belongs and what does not.
A count is made of real things: people, households, firms, votes. To count them, someone first had to decide what is alike. Which kinds of work are the same kind. Which lives belong in the same column. Every number rests on those decisions, and when counts come together to become statistics, the decisions disappear into the total. We read numbers, and how they come together, to tell stories about how Pakistan lives and works. Everything in Adaad starts with a number.
Who publishes Adaad
Adaad is written and edited by Hiba Sameen, an economist and data scientist with a PhD in Economics. She works with large administrative and survey datasets. She built Data Darbar, an open explorer of the census, 8-digit trade, national accounts and the federal budget, and Aiwan-e-Jamhoor, which maps every National Assembly election since 1977 — eleven of them — on the boundaries in force at the time.
Adaad is where those datasets become arguments and insights. Each issue takes one question of policy, or the context behind it, and reads the relevant data closely. The data is published underneath, so you can check the reading for yourself.
Adaad is a personal project: it carries no institutional affiliation, and nothing in it should be read as the position of any employer.
An open explorer of Pakistan's official statistics — census, trade, national accounts and the federal budget, mapped and traceable to source. The indicator library Adaad's charts are built from.
Eleven general elections, 1977–2024, mapped on the boundaries in force at the time, with the full candidate list behind every seat.
Who makes Adaad
Hiba Sameen is a London-based economist and data scientist with fifteen years across government, think tanks and academia. She holds a PhD in Economics. She edits Adaad and builds its two companion sites, Data Darbar and Aiwan-e-Jamhoor.
Tom Phillips is a London-based communications specialist with a press and media background across current affairs, international development and climate policy. He sub-edits Adaad.
Zoya Sameen is Assistant Professor of History at Aga Khan University and a consultant on Aiwan-e-Jamhoor. She designed Adaad’s logo and wordmark.
Who has written for Adaad
A professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at Aga Khan University, Karachi, and its former chair. He spent sixteen years at the World Health Organization, including as Director of Health System Development for the Eastern Mediterranean region and as WHO Representative to Lebanon and to Iran. He co-chairs Pakistan’s National Advisory Committee on Health, led the development of the Health and Population Policy 2026–2035, and is lead editor of Making Health Systems Work in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (Cambridge University Press).
An economics graduate from NUST and an applied researcher working across economic, financial and policy analysis. He works in equity research and writes independently on Pakistan’s economy, with a particular interest in industrialisation, structural change and data-driven economic research.
Sana Zaman Butt is a policy researcher and writer whose work spans human rights, international development and public policy. A recent Fulbright Scholar with an MPA from Columbia University, she is interested in data-driven public-interest research on government decision-making, regulation and state capacity, and their effects on inequality and access.
Write for Adaad
If you have a question the data can answer — or data that raises a question — pitch it to editor@adaad.org. A pitch needs four things: the question, the dataset you would answer it with, the result you hypothesise, and the result that would surprise you. Analysts, researchers and first-time writers are all welcome; we edit closely and publish the data alongside the piece, under the same standards as everything else here.