Investments in foundational learning in Pakistan, if made in the right direction, can generate enormous economic gains that compound over the working lives of millions of children.
These views were expressed by Prof Tahir Andrabi, Professor of Economics at Pomona College, Claremont (California) and o-founder of the Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP). He was speaking at a high-level research and policy exchange titled From Learning to Earnings: The Long-Term Impacts of Improving Foundational Learning.
The event, held at the Pakistan Institute of Education (PIE), drew a large number of policymakers, researchers, scholars and education leaders.
Organized by PIE in collaboration with CERP as part of the latter’s national Learn to Earn campaign, the event aimed at highlighting the economic value of improving early learning outcomes.
Prof Andrabi said that even under conservative assumptions, foundational learning stands out as one of the highest-return investments Pakistan can make. “Even using conservative estimates from rural Pakistan, where baseline wages are low, foundational learning emerges as one of the highest-return investments a country can make,” he noted.
The discussion centred on new findings from the Learning and Educational Achievements in Pakistan Schools (LEAPS) study, one of the most comprehensive education datasets in the country. For the first time, researchers have tracked the same cohort of children in rural Pakistan for more than 15 years, linking early learning outcomes to years of schooling completed and wages earned in adulthood.
According to the findings, school quality plays a decisive role in shaping long-term outcomes. Moving a student from the worst-performing school in a village to the best-performing one increases completed schooling by an average of 2.06 years. In a typical primary school classroom of around 70 to 75 students, this improvement translates into approximately Rs85 million in discounted lifetime wage gains for a single cohort.
When scaled up nationally, the cumulative impact runs into hundreds of billions of dollars in lifetime earnings, recurring with every new cohort of students. A significant portion of these gains would flow back to the government in the form of higher tax revenues, effectively allowing investments in foundational learning to pay for themselves over time.
