The Growth Strategy Pakistan Keeps Leaving at Home

Pakistan’s search for faster growth usually focuses on exports, investment, energy, and technology. Yet one of its largest underused economic assets is already present: millions of women whose education, skills, and labour do not translate into secure paid work.

This is often described as a social inclusion issue. It is also a macroeconomic constraint.

The Barriers Form a System

Low participation is not explained by a single missing policy. Transport may be unsafe or unreliable. Affordable childcare may not exist. Workplaces may lack basic facilities or credible protection from harassment. Families may judge employment as not worth the risk when wages are low and travel consumes time and money.

Digital and home-based work can widen options, but it can also hide poor pay, insecurity, and unpaid labour. Access to a platform is not the same as access to a career.

That means isolated training programmes will have limited effect. Skills matter only when women can reach jobs, remain in them, control their earnings, and advance.

Measure Work More Honestly

Official statistics are improving their treatment of unpaid domestic and care work, informality, own-use production, and platform labour. This matters because what is not counted is easily excluded from economic policy.

Better measurement should reveal the transition points where women leave education or employment, the sectors where they cluster, and the wage and mobility penalties they face. The goal is not simply to raise a headline participation rate, but to expand productive, safe, and fairly paid work.

A Whole-Economy Agenda

Cities can improve safe public transport. Employers can offer predictable schedules, childcare support, and transparent promotion. Financial institutions can design accounts and credit products women can control. The state can enforce workplace protections and make care services part of economic infrastructure.

Export and digital policies should also ask who gets the jobs created. Growth that draws on only part of the country’s talent base will remain narrower and less resilient than Pakistan needs.

The next development strategy should stop treating women’s employment as a chapter added after the economic plan is written. It belongs at the centre of the plan.

Source note

This forecast is informed by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics Labour Force Survey 2024–25 and the population and employment chapter of the Pakistan Economic Survey 2025–26.