Pakistan is a lower-middle-income country in South Asia and home to one of the largest out-of-school children populations in the world. Structural barriers to education access are extensive, including acute shortages of school facilities, chronic teacher shortages, deeply entrenched gender disparities that disproportionately exclude girls, widespread poverty, and a significant population of refugees and internally displaced persons whose children face additional layers of exclusion from formal schooling.

Refugee children in Pakistan, predominantly from Afghanistan, face particular structural disadvantage, with restricted legal status, limited documentation, language barriers, and the necessity of contributing to household income all constraining their access to and retention in formal education. Home-based schools and community-run learning programmes have proven essential in reaching children in settings where formal school access is wholly unavailable. The scale and persistence of educational exclusion in Pakistan demands sustained, multi-dimensional intervention targeting both supply and demand-side barriers.

In response to these conditions, Education Above All Foundation has engaged in Pakistan across three successive phases of large-scale refugee education partnership with UNHCR, delivering classroom construction, home-based schooling, teacher training, and learning materials to the most marginalised refugee and displaced children across the country.