Uneven ground

Pakistan’s latest poverty figures show how sharply living standards have deteriorated. In 2024–25, 28.9 per cent of Pakistanis lived below the national poverty line, up from 21.9 per cent in 2018–19, according to the Pakistan Economic Survey. That is nearly three people in ten.

Poverty is one part of a wider pattern of inequality. Income and wealth are unevenly distributed, as are opportunities to study, find work and influence public decisions. Gender and geography shape those opportunities too. These differences matter on both sides of the poverty line. The same illness can be an expense one family absorbs and a debt another carries for years. Families differ in what they own and earn, but also in how much uncertainty they can afford.

The state helps shape these inequalities through the taxes it collects and the services it provides. A salary passes through institutions built to record and tax it. Other incomes are harder to find and assess. Public provision is uneven too: the services a family can use depend heavily on where it lives. The ability to collect tax from a household does not ensure that a dependable school or clinic will be there when that household needs it.

Education makes this uneven provision particularly clear. Where a village has a boys’ school but no girls’ school, children in the same place face different barriers to education. For a girl, continuing her education may depend on whether her family can afford transport to a school further away. The absence of a local school becomes a cost her family must meet each day.

This is how a shortfall in public provision can become a private burden. Families with enough money may be able to buy their way around it. Those with less must find the time, make the journey or go without. The same missing service can therefore deepen an inequality that was already there. What one child can take for granted, another family must organise its life to secure.

Closing these gaps requires decisions about where schools and clinics are built, whether they have staff, and how their running costs are paid. It also requires a tax system that can collect fairly across different sources of income. These are matters of public policy, with consequences for how far a family’s resources will stretch.

There are reasons to believe that capacity can be built. In the household survey, support from the Benazir Income Support Programme is concentrated among poorer households. Its reach remains incomplete, but it shows that Pakistan can build an administrative system that identifies need and directs assistance towards it. That achievement belongs alongside the failures when we consider what the state is capable of doing.

This issue examines some of the ways inequality shapes life in Pakistan. Public provision is part of that wider story, alongside differences in wealth, opportunity and power. A more capable state would give people firmer ground beneath their efforts: a school journey they can sustain, care they can reach, and enough security to make plans beyond the next bill.

Three contributors have written for this issue. If you have a story, analysis or dataset you think belongs in Adaad, write to editor@adaad.org. We also welcome corrections and questions about our work. If you spot an error or think we have missed something, please let us know.