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information to be able to arrive at some measure of socioeconomic status. The survey also
gathers school-level information on one government school within the village.
The ASER journey started in 2008 when a national organization (Idara Taleem-o-Aagahi)
developed and piloted the tools for the first time in 11 districts and assessed 16, 737 children.
Since then, ASER has progressively grown in scope to cover all rural districts in the country
(across all provinces) and some urban areas over recent years. In 2016, for example, the survey
covered 144 rural districts across Pakistan, covering more than 4000 villages and over 5000
schools and assessing over 250,000 children through 10,000 volunteers. Appendix Table A3
summarizes the coverage of ASER over the years.
There are, however, some important criticisms of ASER data. A key criticism relates to the very
narrow set of mechanical functions that it is able to measure in computation and ability to
recognize characters for reading but not being able to truly assess real understanding. The way
the data are measured also only allows a very narrow usage of the resultant data (see below).
Another key limitation of the data are that they are mainly rural. Although ASER Pakistan does
collect some data in urban wards, the data are limited and not used in the analysis in this report.
Also, the data is not captured from the same children every year. Instead, the 20 villages remain
the same while 10 are added every year to keep the sample size to 30 villages from each district.
3.3.3. Major Trends in Education Statistics
Several studies and reports in the country have repeatedly identified some clear markers of
disadvantage. Among them, gender, geographical location and socio-economic status emerge as
some of the critical determinants of hardship. For example, the Pakistan Education Statistics
(2015/2016) highlight the clear gender divide in the country in that the education system caters
to a larger share of males (56%) as compared to females (44%). Poverty and socio-economic
status also continues to further marginalize individual’s access to education and being located
in a remote or conflict-ridden area further compounds these effects. The following sub-sections
present some simple descriptive statistics focusing on these well-known markers of
disadvantage within the country.
Educational access
Pakistan has made great strides in improving educational access. This is reflected in
improvements in gross enrolment rates and participation rates over time (Economic Survey of
Pakistan, 2015-16). However, universal access has still not been achieved and there are wide
disparities across regions and provinces and for particular groups of children. Appendix Table
A4 illustrates educational access for children aged 3-5 and for those of primary school-age (ages
6-10) with the latter illustrated using ASER data from 2015 and 2016 and PSLM data for 2014-
15. The table indicates that the country remains persistently away from the universal access to
basic education benchmark but there are disparities across the provinces with Balochistan
persistently performing well below the national average.
Figure 3.3.2 depicts a more time-series picture of enrolment trends in rural Pakistan using ASER
data. Some key findings include the gently upward trend in enrolment between 2012 and 2016
amongst the 6-10 year olds but wide and gaping disparities. Rural areas of economically poorer
provinces such as Balochistan and Sindh perform far below the national average in providing
basic schooling to their children and AJK and Punjab are amongst the ‘best performers’ when
assessed on this parameter.