Vote for Safe Education (2023–24)

Around 26 million children are out of school in Pakistan, the highest number anywhere in the world, while the state has for decades spent less than 2 percent of GDP on education, far below what sustainable progress requires. Inadequate funding, poor quality, and inaccessibility remain the sector's defining challenges, and extreme poverty and inflation have driven a sharp rise in child labour and early marriage, while the lack of safe, inclusive spaces in schools pushes dropout rates higher still. Taking the February 2024 general elections as an opening in an active political landscape, PCE launched the Vote for Safe Education campaign with a consortium of like-minded organisations. Its aims were to mainstream marginalised voices in political discourse, mobilise political actors to treat education as a top priority, and ensure education featured in the party manifestos of 2024.

From grassroots findings to a Charter of Education: The campaign's centrepiece, a comprehensive Charter of Education, did not begin in a boardroom. Its first draft grew directly out of the findings and recommendations of the 2023 Global Action Week campaign, Decolonizing Education Financing, which had documented, district by district, what communities most needed from the education budget. Those grassroots demands were then developed and refined through further consultations with stakeholders including District Education Officers, PTAs, School Management Committees, PAGE, CSOs, and youth representatives, capturing demands across short-, medium-, and long-term goals. The result was a gender-responsive charter that reflected the aspirations of diverse groups, including girls, youth, persons with disabilities, and transgender individuals, and it became the backbone of the campaign's narrative.

Presented, debated, and endorsed: With the charter drafted, PCE took it to the political arena. It organised All-Party Roundtables at the national and provincial levels, where the Charter of Education was presented to party representatives, discussed and debated, and formally endorsed, alongside a data-driven factsheet, State of Education in Pakistan, developed to sharpen the arguments and deepen participants' understanding of the crisis. The charter was also carried into letters sent to party leaders. At PCE's 14th Annual Convention just before the elections, on the theme Build Back Better in Education: Transforming Politics, Policy, and Practice, the National Coordinator unveiled the Charter of Education and, acknowledging the gravity of the situation, called for a national Education Emergency, a call endorsed by all present. 

The outcome: a declared Education Emergency: The campaign's clearest testament came after the vote, when the Prime Minister declared a national Education Emergency, a move that echoed the campaign's central, repeated demand. The declaration aligned closely with the propositions in PCE's Charter of Education: a directive to raise the education budget to 4 percent of GDP by 2029, in line with PCE's call for greater investment; the fast recruitment of quality teaching staff, addressing the charter's concern over the student-to-teacher ratio; and the launch of a National Skill Development Programme to equip youth with market-relevant skills, as the charter had proposed. Just as importantly, the campaign left behind a more informed public, voters more ready to demand accountability from their leaders on education.