Category: Blog

This blog is based on the findings from an assessment conducted for UN Women of how the COVID19 pandemic is likely to impact existing gender inequalities in Pakistan. It is the first in a two-part series. Part I will focus on exacerbating economic inequalities, and part II will focus on the potential social costs of the pandemic for women in Pakistan.

COVID-19 has now spread to over 213 countries. Healthcare systems are stretched thin and are struggling to respond to this global health emergency. As it continues to spread, it is becoming increasingly clear that the virus – and efforts to mitigate its spread – will have dire economic and social repercussions. In a recent report, the IMF has stated that while the effects of the disease will be felt all over, vulnerable populations and disadvantaged communities such as the poor and women, are likely to suffer disproportionately from the outbreak of the disease.

Evidence from around the world suggests that men and woman are both equally likely to contract the virus. It is likely, though, that the economic and social costs of the pandemic will be much higher for women, and existing gender inequalities will be exacerbated. It is also likely that while the short term impact will be significant and will require immediate mitigation, the long term impact will roll back significant progress on gender equality. This is especially true for countries like Pakistan, where the economic and social gender balance is heavily biased in favor of men, and where welfare systems are weak or practically non-existent.

This blog takes a brief look at the impact of this pandemic on the economic conditions of women in Pakistan in the short and long term. Specifically, it will focus on Labor Force Participation (LFP), financial autonomy, and access to financial markets.

Labor Force Participation (LFP):   

Women face a significant loss in employment and resultant falls in income, particularly in the short to medium term. Women’s LFP is largely concentrated in less specialized, lower paying, and/or self-employed work. According to the Labor Force Survey of Pakistan (2017-18), the refined[i]  percentage of women in the labor force is 20.1% as compared to 68% for men. Additionally, the wage gap in Pakistan is significant, even within the limited sphere of employment in which women typically participate. Involuntary unemployment is also higher for females at 8.3% as compared to males at 5.1%. These factors make women’s livelihoods more vulnerable than those of men, and unlikely to absorb an economic shock of this magnitude.

Since the start of the initial government lockdown, this vulnerability has already manifested in the following ways:

1. Women employed by small or medium businesses and those working as domestic workers have faced pay cuts or layoffs due to their employers’ – actual or claimed – inability to continue paying their wages. A 2015 report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that there are currently 12 million HBWs who represent about 60% of the female workforce in Pakistan.. As part of the informal sector, these workers generally have low income security and minimal social protection, which makes them the most economically vulnerable in times of crises.
2. Small and homebased businesses have been able to generate little to no income due to businesses being halted or restricted by the initial lockdown. For businesses that do not have the capacity to go online or work remotely, this situation will only get worse. Most small businesses also do not have large cash reserves and may not be able to reopen post the lockdown/pandemic. Further, businesses that provide employment to other women (for example small beauty salons) will be unable to pay employees indefinitely under current circumstances.
3. A large proportion of working women are employed as teachers. Because of indefinite school closures, these women are now at home. Currently, public sector teachers continue to be paid. However, private sector teachers, especially those in low-cost private schools, are facing an increased risk of reduced or delayed incomes, or even being laid off.
4. Women employed in urban centres often travel large distances on public and private transport to get to work. Hindered mobility due to the initial lockdown caused an increase in workforce absenteeism, and subsequently reduced income due to lost wages for daily wage earners. As intermittent and smart lockdowns continue to be a reality for the foreseeable future, hindered mobility and increased absenteeism may also result in loss of employment for many.

In the longer term, the longer the pandemic and intermittent lockdown continues, unemployment will rise, the wage gap between men and women will rise even further.

Financial Autonomy:

Women generally have less ownership and control over financial and physical assets (house, land, etc). Even in cases where the actual asset ownership may lie with the woman of a household, it is likely that she may not be able to exercise much control over the assets. Financial autonomy for women – such as it is – is likely to decrease even further, particularly in the short term.  There are two major reasons for this:

1. With intermittent lockdowns and business closures a reality for the foreseeable future, vulnerable households with no savings will look to sell-off assets to weather the storm. Given the lack of control women exercise over assets, it is likely that the assets sold first will be those belonging to women.
2. Smaller assets such as gold, which are generally owned by women, tend to be more liquid and are therefore easier to sell in times of crisis.

Access to Financial Markets:

Over the years, Pakistan has seen an increase in the number of women taking microfinance and agricultural loans. According to a report by the World Bank, 59 percent of microfinance clients are women.  Often these microfinance loans are linked to the ownership and management of small businesses. In times of public health crises, as women are less fluid in terms of cash flows and savings, the ability to pay back loans may be affected. This could result in higher interest rates, penalties in repayment and reduced access to loans from formal associations in the future.

Conclusion:

For women in Pakistan’s labour force – especially those belonging to the informal sector – the lockdown due to the pandemic and subsequent decline in economic activities have resulted in significant losses. These have manifested in the form of lay-offs, closures of businesses, increased food insecurity and an overall loss of agency over their financial situation. It is imperative that small and female owned businesses be provided with short term loans to sustain their workforce, prioritize keeping their female employees and prevent further widening of the wage gap. Although the government has been making efforts to provide financial support to those most afflicted by the lockdown, many females do not have access to these relief efforts. Teachers in low-cost private schools for example, may not classify to receive government relief funds. Additionally, many domestic and home-based workers may not be registered within the NADRA database which further exacerbates the problem as they are completely invisible to the system. The government needs to initiate registration drives in order to provide women with CNICs. This would allow the government to have greater outreach to the most destitute strata of society, helping with disaster relief efforts in the future.

 

[i] the currently active population expressed as a percentage of the population 10 years and above

 

Sahar Kamran is a Senior Research Associate, and Maheen Saleem Khosa is the Manager Communications at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS).  

Nadia[i] is a thirty-two-year-old ENT Specialist and mother of an eight-year-old boy. She works at a large public hospital in Lahore. As an essential worker, she has continued to work since the beginning of the government lockdown in Pakistan. When asked if and how the nature of her work had changed because of the spike in Coronavirus cases, she replied:

‘Work is work. This may be controversial to say, but I honestly don’t find it to be that different. We took care of sick people before and we take care of them now. I suppose there is an additional fear of getting sick now but that comes with the job. Actually, I’m more worried about what my kid is doing stuck at home all day.’[ii]

Musa (age eight) has been at home full-time since schools closed in mid-April. His school did not initially transition to online learning. The school, a private institution in Lahore for pre-nursery to grade six, encouraged parents to use this time to review the curriculum that had already been covered but no new material was shared. When it became clear that the lockdown was to continue indefinitely the school shifted to remote learning. WhatsApp groups were set up as the primary mode of communication between parents and teachers. Teachers were responsible for sharing learning materials daily. If there was any homework, it was the parents’ responsibility to work with their children to complete the work, scan it, and send it to the teacher within the specified deadline.

In conversations with Nadia regarding the transition to this new mode of teaching and learning, and how well she believed it was catering to the needs of her child, two themes emerged.

Stimulation, Engagement and the Learning Environment

Nadia believes having some schoolwork to complete during this unprecedented time is better than nothing, but she does not think the material the school is sharing is as challenging or intellectually stimulating as what was being covered prior to the lockdown. She feels there has been a regression in the difficulty of both mathematical concepts and reading levels.

‘Before the schools shut down, he (Musa) was comfortable with his multiplication tables. I could ask him anytime and he could tell me something like 7×8 on the spot. Now I’ll be surprised if he remembers his five table [sic]. But how can he be expected to remember? All the worksheets are asking him to perform single-digit multiplication and addition which he was comfortable with even last year. Yes, revision is important but for how long? If this is how things are now should we not also be moving forward and learning new concepts? If this isn’t possible then why do they insist on testing it?’

She also has concerns regarding keeping Musa motivated and engaged with his schoolwork.

‘It takes him maybe thirty minutes to finish the assigned reading and maths for the day. No other subjects have any work. I try to get him to do worksheets that I find myself on the internet and to read other books, but he resists. He thinks it’s unfair that I give him extra work after he finishes what he gets from the school. All he wants to do is watch YouTube videos. His tantrums have definitely been harder to manage, but I don’t know how to make it more interesting for him.’

Another aspect that contributes to a lack of engagement is the learning environment. Without his usual routine in which he interacts with his friends and teachers, it is hard for Musa to imagine that he is in school.

‘Mama says school is at home now but what kind of school is this? My school has a playground with a slide, and I play football with my friends. I also have my own desk, which is the tidiest one in the classroom, even the teacher said so. At home it’s just boring stuff. I can’t even beat Arsalan (referring to his closest friend) in the tests.’

Musa misses interactions such as playing and competing with his friends, and objects such as his desk and a slide.  He sees these as representative of a ‘real’ school environment. Without these representations, he has difficulty time accepting that his home is now also his school. This indicates that children remain motivated and engaged in learning, and ascribe value to schooling, not just via the academics inside a classroom, but also with the other activities, objects and interactions that constitute a typical school day.

The Gender Lens: Managing Professional and Domestic Responsibilities

In addition to her work, Nadia feels that she has inadequate time and support for her son’s schooling because of her domestic responsibilities have also increased. To adhere to quarantine Nadia no longer has domestic help come to her house. As a result, all the female members of her household are expected to take on additional household responsibilities.

‘My husband is working from home. He works long hours but even if he didn’t, you know how things are, the men aren’t expected to do the cooking and cleaning. I tell him – if you don’t want to do that stuff fine but – at least sit with Musa during the day when I’m gone and help him do his (school) work. But even that seems to be a woman’s job. The cook is the woman, the cleaner is the woman, the babysitter is the woman and the teacher is also the woman, I guess. Musa knows this too, by the way. He knows Papa time is playtime and Mama is the bad guy that will make him do his schoolwork and chores’.

These gendered expectations and distribution of work within the household are what a lot women in Pakistani households navigate daily. All twenty-seven members of the WhatsApp group for Musa’s class are women. Alongside additional pressure in terms of domestic and child-rearing responsibilities, mothers also seem to be the primary point of contact between students and teachers.

Given all these difficulties, Nadia concluded:

‘I’ve given up with the school now, I don’t take it as seriously as I used to in the beginning. And they don’t take it seriously either because even when I don’t send back assignments they don’t follow up. But that’s okay. I believe Musa is happier and learns more when he sits with his dado (grandmother) and listens to the stories she tells him about the Prophets. He also likes to take care of the garden with his Chachi (paternal aunt) and that teaches him about to grow plants and vegetables. Even I’ve gotten creative now and we have a game where he’s in charge of making the budget for grocery shopping and double checking that everything adds up on the bill afterwards.’

Implications for Policy

Nadia and Musa’s experiences provide valuable insight into the challenges of remote education service delivery. For young children, the distance between teachers and students has increased, both in terms of physical space, and the number of intermediaries between them. Young children are connected to educators through intermediaries such as parents and older siblings, without the possibility of being in the same classroom for the foreseeable future.  These intermediaries are also managing newfound personal, academic, and professional responsibilities and challenges.

If efforts in remote learning are to be successful, the perspectives of these stakeholders and intermediaries is vital.  Policymakers need to identify the systematic and recurring gaps in the chain of delivery. By knowing who in the household is responsible for relaying the material shared by teachers, policymakers and educators can tailor the content and mode of delivery to mitigate the constraints of these individuals. Knowledge of who these intermediaries are and how they experience and interact with infrastructures for remote learning also opens opportunities for capacity building initiatives that are tailored to their needs.

Nadia’s insights should also prompt policymakers to confront a higher-order question: What constitutes learning? Can the ways in which we have conceptualized learning and success in the past continue to be the same in Corona time, or even post Corona? Nadia felt that Musa learned more and was more engaged when routine household activities like grocery shopping, gardening, and informal storytelling were tweaked to include overt educational components. Through incorporating challenges, questions and prompts routine household tasks became important sites for learning and inquiry in a unique and novel way that piqued her son’s interest and curiosity.

All this begs the question, is the best way to take learning from the school to the home through worksheets, online assessments and lectures, which necessitate putting children in front of a t screen for extended periods of time? Or are history and politics better learned through the lived experiences of grandparents? Could the routine servicing of a car be a lesson in science and mechanics? Can an everyday chore such as separating and taking out the trash be a chance to learn about recycling and sustainability? Everyday life is rife with opportunities for children to learn across a spectrum of subject matter. The challenge for policymakers, administrators, teachers is to re-conceptualize and mobilize education service delivery in a way that recognizes and capitalizes on these opportunities. Rather than trying to reconstruct or impose the routine and rituals of a ‘regular’ school in the home, perhaps this pandemic should shift the focus of educators to reassess the tools, modes, and milestones that characterize traditional education, and subsequently work towards reimagining curricula and lesson plans to make them easier to integrate with home life. This could be the key to ensuring that children continue to feel engaged with their learning and parents feel equipped and able to work with their children and invest in their continued development.

[i] The names of participants have been changed. Names and identifying characteristics of any institutions mentioned have been omitted.

[ii] The quotes that are included in the text are translations. The actual conversations took place in a combination of Urdu and English.

Safa Kashaf is a Senior Research Assistant at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS).

This blog is part of a series from the REAL Centre reflecting on the impacts of the current COVID-19 pandemic on research work on international education and development. It has also been published on the UKFIET website. 

The role of governments is key in mitigating the disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education delivery and outcomes. Effective response guidelines for governments stress the need to plan for long-term disruptions and strategic adaptation, and to coordinate, communicate with and support the education workforce, including and especially the head teachers and teachers. Much like the health response to the pandemic, an effective education response requires planning for phases. At the onset of the emergency, most countries mounted a rapid response by leveraging technology to start home-schooling mechanisms that can help cope with lost instructional time. The second phase requires policy planning for managing continuity of instruction when schools reopen, including ensuring children return to schools, instruction takes account of potential learning losses during time away from schools, and teachers and school leaders are fully supported as they work to realise these goals.

In this blog I consider what these guidelines mean for Pakistan’s large, diverse, federated education system. I argue that given the scale of operations and the nature of entrenched inequities, the key guiding principles should be to address inequalities and to strengthen decentralised governance and service delivery. Existing data, vulnerability assessments and rapid evaluations can help inform policy for more effective COVID-19 response.

Multidimensional inequalities define the shape of the challenges faced by education systems today

As a result of global school closures, it has become immediately clear that the children at risk of dropping out and those who are likely to experience the most significant learning losses are the ones from marginalised backgrounds. Poverty, gender and location are intersecting to entrench exclusion for already-marginalised children. Existing data sources help establish the scale and scope of the challenge.

Federal and provincial governments in Pakistan have moved quickly to start airing curricular content for K-12 via television channels. This is the correct strategy, given televisions are much more widely owned than radios: according to DHS 2017, 62.5% of the sampled households had a TV compared with 11% who own a radio. However, these averages hide stark inequalities. For example, in Punjab children in households in the poorest homes (only 17% of whom have TVs in their homes) are much less likely to be able to benefit from this policy initiative than children in the richest households (95% of whom have access to television). The numbers for Sindh are similar: 96% of households in the top quartile have televisions, 20% in the bottom quartile have televisions.

Accessing these opportunities and initiatives becomes more complex and unequal if priced technologies such as cable channels or internet and smart phones are used: Less than 1% of the poorest households sampled for Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) 2017 owned a computer, and while 82% of them owned a cell phone, only 4% had access to internet. District officials in Punjab share that internet and cable infrastructure is common and reliable in urban areas. Children further away from cities are much less likely to have access to instructional content sent through smart phones and aired on cable channels. Officials distinguish between parents who own smart phones and those who do not, a divide that is significant because many government school teachers in Punjab are relying on WhatsApp for communicating with parents. Parental occupations directly impact the opportunities children can take advantage of; during the crop-cutting season, many in rural areas are likely to be helping their parents harvest crops

The gendered experience of exclusion from access to technology and the increased burden of care on girls is a key dimension of inequality during this disruption. A recent blog about access to digital learning demonstrates that girls are much less likely to have regular access to any form of technology. Inequalities in access worsen for girls in rural areas and those in the poorest households. The increased burden of care in the households during the pandemic is much more likely to have hit girls the hardest, making it much more likely that they are effectively excluded from accessing COVID-response measures around education. Globally, women and girls carry out three times the amount of unpaid care and domestic work than men and boys, and this load is likely to have increased during periods of school closures and lockdowns. As COVID-associated health and economic shocks threaten to push millions into extreme poverty, girls are more at risk of dropping out of schools.

Learning losses are likely to be unequal also

Being in school matters for learning. Research on teaching and learning in government schools in rural Pakistan shows 10% learning gains after a year of regular schooling for children in grades 3, 4 and 5. These gains are threatened by school closures for reasons listed above.

The World Bank has outlined three scenarios of learning losses that governments should prepare for when schools reopen:

1. there is a loss of learning for all students due to school disruptions;
2. the lowest performing children fall further behind while the well-performing children move ahead – this is predicted based on the ability of the families to support children in keeping up with reading and writing and access to assets such as televisions and a good internet or cable connection;
3. there is a sudden and large increase in numbers of children for whom learning falls because of an increase in numbers of drop outs.

Government schools in Pakistan are likely to find themselves facing the second or the third scenario. Furthermore, provinces stand at various levels of capability for testing and also delivering learning gains. Pre-pandemic learning data show much less variation in children’s ability to read in local languages in the early grades across provinces (between 72 and 80% in grade 1 were able read letters); there is much higher variation in skills in higher grades (68% children in rural Punjab could read a story in local language, while only 40% in Sindh could do so) (ASER, 2018). This is true for Maths and English literacy as well.

It will be imperative to assess children when they return to school to establish learning losses, which are likely to vary for children given differential access to home support, technologies and differential exposure to health and economic shocks.

Medium to long term continuity will need to account for inequalities

Ensuring that policy responses address inequalities requires systems that can: mobilise quickly to collect information about the situation of teachers, schools, students and communities; repurpose their workforce to support new goals for coping in the crisis and managing continuity; plan for changes in instructional calendars and goals; make space for experimenting with new techniques that have proven to be effective for improving teaching and learning.

Data for identifying at-risk children

Strengthening of data systems has been one of the key areas of progress in education system development in Pakistan over the past couple of decades. All four provinces in Pakistan have well-functioning Management Information Systems (MIS) that collect data on operations of schools on a regular basis. These systems can be quickly repurposed for planning for COVID response. Tangibly, this requires individual and community level information about children who are more at risk of dropping out, those who aren’t able to access home schooling measures/technology, who are in households that have experienced health and/or economic shocks during this emergency. Given the proximity between schools and homes, teachers and head teachers are best placed to provide this information. District officials in Pakistan are confident that teachers and head teachers have (or can quickly gather) information needed for identifying different cohorts of children.

 Plan for strategies for resumption of attendance and reduction of drop-outs of the most at-risk

All four provinces in Pakistan have girls’ stipend programmes in place for maintaining enrolments through high schools. These may need to be expanded and the stipend raised (even if as a one-time measure) to increase the likelihood of girls returning to schools.

Education departments routinely rely on teachers to run door-to-door campaigns for school enrollment and for improving attendance at the start of a school year. However, placing the entire burden of the task on teachers and school leaders detracts from their instructional responsibilities. Given the scale and scope of disruption, teachers and school leaders must be supported by running a dedicated, large-scale coordinated, public awareness campaign when schools reopen after the COVID closures. This can be combined with targeted text messaging and personalised visits for children who are living in localities or households identified as high-risk.

Small scale rapid evaluations of various measures as they are implemented can help assess impact and correct course.

 Plan for assessing children to inform remedial and differentiated teaching strategies

The past decade has seen investments in building capacities for generating learning data in classrooms in at least three provinces. These foundations can be used to generate sample-based assessments for system-level diagnostics, combined with best practices in formative assessments that can help teachers direct instruction at an individual level.

Provincial education departments are working on readjustment of curricular goals for the year to make them more realistic, with advice from subject experts. Remedial instruction strategies, proven to be effective, can be combined with rationalised goals to ensure all children, particularly those excluded from instructional support during school closures, are able to catch up. Finally, this emergency presents an opportunity to test strategies that allow teaching children at the right level, rather than prescribed student learning objectives (SLOs).

It is imperative to incorporate the experience and voices of teachers in planning for instructional continuity. Chronic shortages in the system means teachers in government schools across provinces in Pakistan acquire experience and skills on the job for teaching multi-grade classrooms. These skills may offer a foundational concept that can be built on to equip teachers with effective strategies for teaching differential ability students in the same classroom.

Decentralised systems are likely to be more effective and resilient in responding to disruptions

Achieving the tasks set out above require very large education systems to be able to plan, repurpose and implement fairly quickly. It becomes clear in conversations with various stakeholders involved with government response to COVID-19 that provinces will be benefiting now from reform efforts undertaken in the past couple of decades. Effective response to emergencies is contingent on repurposing of existing structures that reach schools, teachers and communities, and are responsive to local contexts and problems. In so far as this is true, decentralised structures are better primed for the job. At the provincial and district level, this requires:

• capacity for data collection and utilisation (including data on at-risk children, teaching and learning);
• staffed structures in place that link higher tiers of governance with small clusters of schools;
• capacity to deliver on-site, continuous teacher training and support programs;
• flexible financing for schools.

Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) have made the most progress so far on reducing teacher shortages, building system infrastructure for on-site teacher training, putting in place the human resource and technical capacity of education departments at the district level to support teachers and head teachers, collecting teaching and learning data and utilising data for policy planning, and making financing available to schools. Punjab and KP have added this depth to their district level delivery and governance structures over the past decade: the tier of Assistant Education Officers (AEOs) in both provinces are managing between 10 and 40 schools. In Sindh in contrast, Talukka officers are managing up to 100 schools. Sindh and Balochistan may need to invest simultaneously in building these systems while planning for coping and continuance strategies. All provinces will need to empower teachers and head teachers as key actors in their response plans.

Real-time systems level analysis of structures and functions, as well as qualitative documentation of management and response practices at various hierarchical levels and across provincial contexts can potentially generate important insights about delivery and governance mechanisms that make education systems more resilient to crises.

Dr. Rabea Malik is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS) and an Assistant Professor at the School of Education, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS).

There is little doubt that a changed world awaits us on the other side of COVID-19. The contours of what these changes will look like, and their magnitudes, will depend largely on how we diagnose not only how the pandemic started, but also how we responded to it. With breakdowns in global supply chains, will countries adopt more insular economic policies? Or will they recognize the benefits of a trade system that allows risk pooling? As more and more people change not only how they work, but also how they interact with society, questions have been raised about how many of these changes will last beyond the pandemic.

Perhaps the most harrowing feature of the pandemic is not that it brought the global economy to a virtual standstill, but that it has taken on a uniquely urban outlook. In that respect, the corona virus is not just a threat, it is a uniquely urban threat. With social distancing, self-isolation, and quarantine becoming the norm over the past few months, it has forced us to turn inwards and left us bereft of the physical contact and proximity to others that define modern city life. Many cities have been forced to confront the reality that what made cities great previously, is now the very thing that has made them vulnerable to the pandemic.

It is far too early to talk about the lessons that can be learnt from the corona virus while the world still struggles to fight the pandemic, but there are three key questions that we need to focus on, even as the fight continues, to enable us to make better decisions in the future. First, how did the pandemic start? We know that the blame largely falls on poor sanitary standards in China’s wet markets. There will undoubtedly be renewed pressure in the future for countries to improve health and safety regulations. Second, how did the virus spread? And third, how did governments respond to the crisis? It is the latter two questions that have occupied policymakers since the outbreak, and will continue to be the subject of much research in the times to come.

In the midst of this, commentators have been quick to single out the enemy: urban density. In an article in the Washington Post, Joel Totkin says: “Just as progressives and environmentalists hoped the era of automotive dominance and suburban sprawl was coming to end, a globalized world that spreads pandemics quickly will push workers back into their cars and out to the hinterlands.” These opinions have been echoed by Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, who in a tweet urged New York City to rethink and reduce density.

Similar concerns about density were also voiced in Pakistan and other low-income countries. If the pandemic were to strike one of Lahore or Karachi’s hyper-dense low-income localities, how would we track its spread, carry out testing, and quarantine areas if necessary? According to research undertaken by the Karachi Urban Lab across 13 informal settlements in Karachi, plot size per household averages 20 square yards. Each household has an average family size of eight to nine people. In places where buildings have expanded vertically, household sizes go up to 30 people per 80 square yards. The people who live in these informal settlements lead precarious lives with respect to their health and safety under the best of times. In times of a pandemic, this risk is heightened to an extreme extent.

Linking urban density with a city’s vulnerability to epi- and pandemics may seem like an obvious and appealing connection. The sheer frequency of interpersonal contacts, whether in public transport or in cramped living spaces, makes people more susceptible to viruses. New York City is an oft quoted example with a population density of over 26000 people per square mile. As of 30^th April, the City had reported over 167,000 confirmed cases of the corona virus and nearly 13000 deaths. Numbers such as these add strength to the argument against densification.

However, as straightforward as the argument against density may seem, it does not withstand closer scrutiny. While there is no doubt that density has had a role to play in the spread of the pandemic, it is important to remember that density is just one of several factors that determine how vulnerable a city is to the pandemic. Equally if not more important are the quality and accessibility of healthcare systems, the fiscal resources available for disaster management, the organizational capacity of city governments, and the timeliness and effectiveness of other policy responses.

Cities like Singapore, Seoul, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, which are extremely dense in their own rights, have out-performed many other less dense cities in containing the virus. Even within the United States, there are marked differences between rich dense areas and poor dense areas. Montreal’s Plateau District has a density of 32,598 people per square mile, higher than the New York City average. Towards the end of March, the district had reported less than 500 cases. In China, cities with the highest coronavirus infection rates were those with relatively low population densities, in the range between 5,000 to 10,000 people per square kilometer.

It is possible to look at this data and think that Singapore and Seoul are wealthy cities as is, with more resources at their disposal, which could be mobilized as soon as the crisis started. This is true. But while correlation does not imply causation, dense cities are more efficient and productive, and hence more wealthy.

Simultaneously, the global spread of the disease also merits further research. The obvious culprits in this case are global cities, busy airports, and global supply chains. With so much connectivity, of course we have a world-wide pandemic. However, there is another story at play here – one about non-global cities, about suburban and peri-urban areas and industrial linkages. This is what the experiences of Germany and Italy tell us.

As complex and difficult as the crisis is, the debate on our urban future comes at the right time. Climate change has already forced us to rethink urbanizations and city life. All future conversations on cities will now need to be had in the context of climate change and sustainability, as well as global pandemics. Perhaps a thin silver lining to come out of the pandemic is that it has put every country and city to the same test. In that respect what researchers have access to is a depth of material to study in an attempt to understand which policy responses worked best, which governance models were most effective, and crucially, what role city density played in the spread, or mitigation, of the disease.

With pressure on Pakistan’s cities to densify and grow upwards, we would do well to learn from these debates in order to chart out a course that would create the best outcomes for our cities and citizens.

Why Density?

The most important thing we must remember is that density in and of itself is not the enemy. The experiences of the East Asian cities tell us as much. The benefits of urban density include better public transport, more affordable housing, better health care facilities, more efficient energy usage, and improved diversity, safety, and vibrancy – all things which give a city its character. As Brent Todarion says, “Density done well should be a design-based approach to responsible city leadership, flowing from a city’s vision and values.”

Moreover, the effects of other policy responses notwithstanding, urban density can have significant positive impacts on healthcare provision in a crisis.

What we should be thinking about now is how has density been done so far? Typically, density has been clubbed into two categories: 1) high density, low-rise, and 2) high-rise, high density. Both types are controversial. While the former brings to mind images of hyper-dense low-income localities, the latter describes an area like Manhattan. In times of a pandemic, both are dangerous. The first comes with smaller accommodation sizes, forcing people closer together. The second has elevators, corridors, and other common spaces, which increase the probability of interpersonal contact.

What the pandemic has shown is that we need to think more and more about what has been called the Goldilocks density. This means that cities need to be “dense enough to support vibrant main streets with retail and services for local needs, but not too high that people can’t take the stairs in a pinch. Dense enough to support bike and transit infrastructure, but not so dense to need subways and huge underground parking garages. Dense enough to build a sense of community, but not so dense as to have everyone slip into anonymity.”

Density, however, does not work in isolation. In order for it to be done well, cities need strong governance structures, robust infrastructure to support it i.e. transportation, waste management, sewerage, and utilities, revenue streams to finance it all, as well as innovative urban planning and design. For Pakistan, this would mean creating empowered local and city governments and a decentralization of resources, as well as investments to build the capacity necessary to create these institutions. Strong local and city administration would give governments the infrastructure and capacity needed in times of a crisis such as this, when the local level becomes the most efficient spatial unit to manage survival (read more here).

Healthcare, density, and pandemics

Perhaps the most significant benefit of dense urban localities is that it makes tracing the contagion much easier. In dense localities, a significant portion of a person’s interactions may take place closer to home, resulting in geographic clusters of the disease that can be tracked and quarantined. In more spread out living arrangements, interactions take place over much larger areas. This makes contact tracing and containing the transmission chain much more difficult.

It is also true that some public goods, such as public transportation and healthcare, only become viable at scale. What this means is that a secondary or tertiary health care facility would only be feasible if a minimum number of people lived in its immediate vicinity. In the event of a pandemic, we need to think about where the doctors and facilities are and where the people live.

With more people living close to each other, it is also easier to scale up and improvise by using alternative venues like theaters and convention centers as field hospitals.

Long-term planning

The corona virus has further highlighted existing inequalities that exist in our society. Many have called the virus the “great equalizer”. While the virus may not discriminate between rich and poor, its effects do. As such, not all people experience the pandemic in the same way. Lockdown for a family living in a 200 square yard house is vastly different from one living in a bungalow in Defense or Model Town. In this article, the Karachi Urban Lab has already highlighted the differences in how the pandemic is experienced across different income classes. These differences include unequal access to water, income, employment, healthcare, and food among others. While the lockdown debate has focused on lost incomes, the majority of Pakistan’s informal settlements are water deprived. For people living in these settlements, using water repeatedly to wash their hands is a luxury they cannot afford. Similarly, the majority of these people also work in the informal sector as daily wagers and are the most vulnerable to lockdowns. Losing even one day of earnings means not being able to feed their families.

In the absence of a robust and well-established social protection mechanism, the government is faced with the herculean task of controlling the spread of the virus, while ensuring people in lower income segments have access to healthcare, food, and other basic sustenance. Public policy is difficult in the best of times. A crisis such as this puts the entire government machinery, as well as society, to the test.

The uniquely urban nature of this crisis should serve as a wake-up call for urban planners, bureaucrats, and policymakers in Pakistan. Our urban planning has been unsustainable, inefficient, and too anti-poor for far too long. Going forward we need to ensure more equitable distribution of resources and more equitable access to urban infrastructure. One metric to measure the scale of the disparity is ownership of land. According to a 2019 study by the Urban Unit in Punjab, in all recognized housing schemes in the province, about 68% of plots lie vacant and 10% are under construction. These plots are owned primarily by the urban upper-classes. While on the one hand residents of informal settlements are cramped into multi-generational, small living spaces, on the other we’ve surrendered vast swathes of our cities to the upper-classes. The poor have been pushed to the margins and the peripheries. This is both unproductive, and quite simply, wrong.

Bakhtiar Iqbal is a Research Assistant at the Consortium for Development Policy Research (CDPR) with an interest in urban planning.

 

Pakistan is a country with a population of 207 million people and a growth rate of 2.4%. However, keeping absolute numbers aside, a deeper look into the demographic structure of the population insinuates a potential economic challenge of an unprecedented scale.

The current population pyramid depicts an age structure with a growing dependency ratio in the presence of low income per capita. Pakistan is one of the youngest countries in the world, with more than 60% of the population under 30 with many needing jobs. Without the right government approach, this youth bulge is a ticking time bomb that can explode through spiralling incidents of wide scale impoverishment and social unrest. While a large youth cohort can be an asset as a young workforce and as a precursor to increased aggregate demand, lack of adequate employment opportunities along with low capital development can convert this economic boon into a bane.

United Nations World Population Prospects (2019) projects that Pakistan’s population  may reach 340 million by 2050 and 400 million by the end of the century. Several experts such as Population Council’s country director, Zeba Sathar, highlight how excessive demand stemming from unrestrained population growth can outpace the supply of essential resources in a major way. In that sense it shows the manifestation of the Malthusian pessimism in Pakistan.

Reducing fertility

The demographic transition — a change from high to low rates of mortality and fertility – strongly influences the trajectory of economic development. In the experience of developed countries in the West and East Asia, a decline in the fertility rate has been the catalyst for balancing out their demographic structure to maximise the working age segment and attain more evenly spread out economic benefits or in other words capture the demographic dividend. However, a missed opportunity can lead to a demographic disaster if the unemployed working age population become ‘forced dependents’ – a probable scenario for Pakistan.

A decline in mortality rate, ensuing from the advent of standard medical technologies and health investments in the country, is always followed by a decline in fertility rate. Even after mortality rates fall, the lag in reducing fertility rates can often range from 50 to 150 years as experienced in some countries. The reason for the longer transition from low mortality to low fertility rates have to do with endogenous factors including government-supported family planning, as well as the overall economic development of the country – without creation of jobs, the incentive to switch from having more children to supplying one’s labour in the economy is lost. Ultimately, without reducing fertility, the likelihood of the working-age population to grow faster than a country’s dependent population is slim thereby sustaining constricted per capita productive capacity of the economy.

Family planning

Imposing higher costs on parents for raising children serves as a deterrent against having more children than the economy can sustainably accommodate. Through state regulation and investment in creating an equitable job market, parents can be incentivized to invest in their children’s education, health, and life skills preparing them to participate in the economy and beginning the virtuous cycle of demographic transition, i.e. rapid and sustained economic growth with a sustained decline in the dependency ratio due to fertility decline.

The demographic transition unfolds in four stages, beginning with stage one consisting of high death and birth rates, followed by stage two categorized by a drop in the death rate but not followed by a decline in birth rates. Since 1998, Pakistan has been in the third stage of the demographic transition whereby birth rates have fallen as a result of contraceptive awareness, wage increases and urbanization, but not made headway in further reducing fertility rates to reach stage four, where birth rates are equal to death rates i.e. the replacement level fertility rate. The current population growth rate of 2.4% is unsustainable despite a decline from 3.1% prior to 1998 to 2.6% in 1998. If Pakistan does not equate its birth rate and death rate by 2045 – requiring a total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1 – it’s productive population will be sandwiched between an ageing and an adolescent population, both segments dependent on the smaller productive population segment. This entails parents to conceive on average no more than 2.1 children.

The government has been taking proactive steps to control population growth through multiple ways:

• the creation of national and provincial task forces and adhering to the directives of the Council of Common Interests (CCI)
• efforts towards provision of universal access to contraceptives
• passing legislative bills relating to pre-marital counselling and financial incentives to lactating mothers to optimally space births
• doubling funds for the population welfare department of each province

In Punjab, the Punjab Population Innovation Fund (PPIF), a non-profit, public sector company, is complementing government efforts by supporting interventions for the reduction of fertility rates in the remotest areas of Punjab. Their target is to increase access to contraceptives. They have liaised with the country’s largest social protection program, Benazir Income Support Group (BISP), for improved population planning.

Job creation

The World Bank predicts Pakistan needs at least 1.5 million jobs annually to maintain the current unemployment rate. However, 2020’s projected GDP growth rate of 2.4% (now having fallen even further during the covid outbreak) is insufficient to absorb new entrants into the labour force – a GDP growth rate of at least 7 to 8% is required for that. With an extremely compromised social protection system and limited fiscal space, the strain on Pakistan’s resources is stretching far beyond comfortable levels.

However, a push towards elevating the literacy, skills and education levels of the masses can lead to reducing the burden of dependents on the state by delaying early marriages which in time can help reduce fertility rates and make it easier for the state to accommodate new entrants to the job market. However, the creation of new jobs should in part be driven by young entrepreneurs generating economic activity – this is especially useful in high-value added sectors such as the manufacturing sector which employs the majority of the country’s workforce. Increased spending on education along with more investment in high-value added sectors must be urgently ramped up.

The process can be sped up by bringing technical and vocational training institutes at the forefront of imparting employable skills. The demographic transition relies on a shift from supply-driven to demand-driven skills provided by skills training providers, such as Technical Education & Vocational Training Authority (TEVTA), aiming to increase the likelihood of gainful employment by job aspirants. As such, skills curricula should be formulated with the help of leading industries. Organisations such as Punjab Skills Development Fund (PSDF) help support this objective through trainings aligned to expectations of the job market.

Only by absorbing the youth bulge into the economy through education and employment, can they be productively engaged and become empowered to unlock the demographic dividend.

Population control programs require institutionalisation

The challenges posed by rapid population growth cannot be addressed solely by the government – support from the private sector and civil society-led initiatives are crucial. Provincial Departments of population welfare need support from other departments such as Health, Education and Women Development while also coordinating with Federal Departments relating to data collection and financial inclusion. The aim should be to singularly address with consensus, through their separate platforms, the need to slow down the fertility rate. Such a system of coordination across multiple sectors both inside and outside the government entails institutionalising a multi-sectoral approach, spanning beyond government tenures to ensure meeting pre-defined targets for achieving optimal population outcomes. This is crucial because, in the past, civil and military governments repeatedly injected their separate ideologies for structuring the society to fit their own political interests thereby affecting the priority given to demographic transition and stalling progress.

Coordination between the provinces and the centre is also paramount. After the 18th Amendment, population welfare – among many other subjects such as health and education – was devolved to the provinces. Currently, provinces receive on-going funds toward population welfare initiatives, however, unreliable data sets remain a key impediment in accurately designing policy to this end. Furthermore, after the seventh National Finance Commission (NFC) Award (2010) provinces have little incentive to practice population control as 82% of resource allocation to the provinces out of the divisible pool (of which 57.5% goes to the provinces) is on the basis of population. Reframing provincial incentives to bring urgency in population planning is important.

Social impediments against population control abound as well. Religious and cultural resistance to the concept of population control coupled with staggered political will makes reform challenging. National dialogue on population growth to bring every stakeholder on-board is much needed. The Council of Common Interests (CCI) and the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) are two constitutional bodies which can spearhead a national consensus on population growth and the demographic dividend. With the right mind-set Pakistan can defuse the population bomb and prove Malthus wrong.

This article has drawn on knowledge from experts at a panel talk organised by CDPR; access the video here. View the  shorter highlights video here.

Interviews:

Dr. Attiya Inayatullah

Dr. Asghar Zaidi

Other information has been drawn from this report.