Against children – Newspaper – DAWN.COM

WHY is this country so against its own children and its own future? Are you sur-prised by this question? Look at some of the statistics and facts below and see if the question is still surprising.

Some 40 per cent of our children are said to be malnourished, that is, four out of 10 children are starving. We are not even able to give polio drops to all our children. We have had more than 70 cases of polio since last year: Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only two countries that still have polio cases.

Around 26 million five-to-16-year-olds are out of school. Most of the children who are in school receive an education of poor quality. In fact, the World Bank puts learning poverty in Pakistan at 77pc!

We are also reproducing at more than 2.5pc per annum. Given the statistics above, should we be having so many children every year? Around 6m children are born in Pakistan every year. Investments in nutrition, health and education are needed for children for the first 15 to 20 years of their life. Given where we stand, should we be producing so many children? At the moment, there is no conversation in policy circles on population control, and it is unlikely that we will have any in the near future.

Given where we stand, should we be producing so many children?

Our infant mortality rates are at 52 per 1,000 live births. The same number is around 22 in Bangladesh and six in Sri Lanka. And the rates in Pakistan have not come down a lot for quite some time now.

Birth registration is completed for only 40pc or so of children born in Pakistan. It means that we do not actually know how many children are born in the country each year, and it is only through the population census — that is carried out every 10 years or whenever we are able to have one — that we find out how many people there are in Pakistan.

Early initiation of breastfeeding is estimated to be only about 18pc in the country and less than 40pc of mothers continue to exclusively breastfeed their child for six months. If there was early initiation, exclusive breastfeeding for six months, and complementary breastfeeding for two years, these on their own could significantly reduce malnutrition and stunting among Pakistani infants. But this, again, is not really on our policymaking and policy implementation agenda.

It is not only that we are failing our children by not providing them with educational opportunities, we are not even giving them a chance to acquire skills that would be of use to them to lead a productive life. Less than a million-odd youth are trained in Pakistan by all training institutes across the country. When the population increases by some 6m individuals every year, not giving all of them an opportunity to get an education or acquire skills is a surefire way of creating problems for the country in the years ahead.

Even before children were exposed to the kind of smog levels that we saw last year, especially in Punjab, an estimated 12pc of deaths among children under the age of five years was linked to environmental pollution. In 2024, and continuing into 2025, we seem to have broken all sorts of records in terms of the levels of pollution that we hit and the length of time for which we were forced to inhale the toxic air. The government had to close down schools for a couple of weeks to reduce the exposure of children to pollution. Air pollutants have a grave impact on the developing lungs of infants and even on brain and cognitive development, while the exposure of pregnant women to air pollutants can result in premature or low-weight births. Children also have smaller lungs and they breathe faster as well so their absorption of pollutants can be greater than others’.

In any population, about 10pc to 12pc of children have special needs. Pakistan is no exception. In fact, with all the difficulties that have been mentioned in this column, it would not be a surprise if the percentage of children needing more support is actually higher. But the children of a lesser god are at best ignored in Pakistan. Given the lack of birth registration and the non-availability of early diagnostics, early interventions are not possible. This lack of intervention limits the potential of children with special needs and hampers and delays their development. Children with special needs are overrepresented in the out-of-school children population; they are at a higher risk of dropping out of school if they happen to be enrolled and are given, in general, a lot less attention in households, schools and larger society than their peers.

In a paper in 2001, William Easterly showed that Pakistan, even when compared to countries with the same level of development as itself, had always invested less in human development — health and education in particular. His data went up to 1999 or 2000. But the story has been the same or even worse since then. We had many years of good GDP growth up to 2000.

In recent years, even growth has gone away and investments, in human development, especially health and education, have become even less of a priority.

Here is a country that keeps making the argument that the youth of Pakistan are what is going to give us the ‘demographic dividend’. Yet, it is clear that we are doing our best not to invest in the children of today. We are shortchanging our children in every way possible. What sort of dividends should we expect from the young people of tomorrow?

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives, and an associate professor of economics at Lums.

Published in Dawn, January 17th, 2025