PCE at UNGA 2025

The week of the UN General Assembly is one of the busiest in the global calendar, a dense run of main sessions and countless side events where the world's education actors gather at once. PCE makes sure Pakistan's civil-society voice is part of that conversation. On the sidelines of UNGA80 itself, our National Coordinator, Zehra Arshad, took part in two key events, carrying local realities and lived experience into international dialogue so that the concerns of Pakistan's learners help shape the global agenda rather than sit outside it.

NEST report launch:

The Network for Education Systems Transformation (NEST, formerly KDNLC), of which PCE is a member, officially launched its first series of reports on the sidelines of the Assembly. The collaborative research, conducted by ten NEST civil society member organisations and supported by the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: to what extent are education systems creating opportunities for children and young people to learn what matters? At the launch, six key findings synthesised from across ten contexts were shared, and Zehra Arshad, as a panelist alongside other NEST representatives, unpacked and contextualised them, bringing Asia, and Pakistan specifically, to the forefront.

During the panel, Zehra made the case that context is not a footnote to education reform but its central story: what happens around a school, the social, economic, and political realities of a place, shapes what happens inside it, and any attempt at systems transformation that overlooks that is bound to fall short. Looking across the ten contexts the research covered, she drew out a productive tension, that the differences between countries are real, but so are the similarities, and it is precisely those shared threads that make learning across borders possible. Rather than reinventing the wheel, she argued, we must learn from and build on one another's experience, and she was especially emphatic about the value of South-South learning: countries of the global South exchanging knowledge directly, rather than defaulting to models imported from elsewhere. Above all, she pressed the point that has long anchored PCE's own work, that the voices at the grassroots must be empowered and placed at the centre of the agenda, so that the people closest to the realities of the system are the ones helping to shape and drive its transformation.

By grounding global insights in specific local contexts, the panel sparked meaningful dialogue on how to close the gap between policy and practice, and how to build systems that genuinely reflect the needs of children and young people.

Watch the launch: https://www.brookings.edu/events/learning-what-matters-in-10-global-south-contexts/

GPE Civil Society Roundtable. Zehra Arshad also joined the Global Partnership for Education's Civil Society Roundtable, chaired by Laura Frigenti, Chief Executive Officer of GPE. The session brought civil society leaders together to explore how collaboration between global education actors and grassroots movements can multiply possibility and drive transformative action toward inclusive, quality education for every learner.