Sindh led Pakistan on education in 1990. It still does today.

Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics team Pulled Pakistan’s DHS microdata from 1990-91 and 2017-18 to see which provinces have actually closed the education gap over nearly three decades — and which haven’t moved as much as you’d expect.

The measure: share of households with at least one member holding 12+ years of education (roughly intermediate/higher-secondary or above).

The results:

→ Sindh: 14.4% → 33.5% (+19.1 points) — led in 1990-91, still leads in 2017-18
→ Punjab: 12.0% → 31.7% (+19.7 points)
→ KP: 10.5% → 28.4% (+17.9 points)
→ Balochistan: 6.4% → 21.1% (+14.7 points) — smallest absolute gain, but more than tripled (3.3x) off the lowest base

Two things stand out:

1. Sindh’s lead has been remarkably stable. Despite enormous urban-rural divides within the province — Karachi’s education infrastructure versus rural Sindh’s — Sindh has topped every other province at both points in time. That’s very likely Karachi doing the heavy lifting on the provincial average; a district-level breakdown would probably show a much starker internal divide than the four-province numbers suggest.

2. Balochistan is closing the gap fastest in relative terms — but the absolute distance is still enormous. Its 2017-18 level (21.1%) is roughly where Sindh and Punjab already stood back in 1990-91. Balochistan isn’t just behind — it’s a full generation behind on this measure, even after genuine, accelerating progress.

Why does this matter beyond the numbers? Household-level education access shapes everything downstream: who gets employed in salaried jobs versus informal work, health-seeking behavior, girls’ school retention, civic participation, and ultimately what public services a province can staff and deliver locally. A province stuck a generation behind on education isn’t just behind on one metric — it’s behind on the entire chain of development outcomes that education unlocks. Provincial education policy in Pakistan can’t be one-size-fits-all; Balochistan and KP need fundamentally different levels of investment and intervention than Punjab and Sindh do at this point.

Data: Pakistan Demographic and Health Surveys 1990-91 and 2017-18 (NIPS).