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. The Adaad logo and wordmark were designed by Zoya Sameen.
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.
Adaad also publishes contributors. 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.