Education Reform Efforts Across SAARC Countries: A Comparative Analysis

South Asia is home to roughly a quarter of the world’s population, and the quality of education across this region has enormous consequences – not just for individual families, but for global development. The six SAARC nations covered here – Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, and Pakistan – have each charted their own course through the challenges of low literacy, gender disparity, and unequal access to schooling. Some have achieved remarkable turnarounds; others are still grappling with deep-rooted structural problems. A side-by-side look at where these countries stand, and what they are doing about it, reveals both the scale of the challenge and the ingenuity of the responses.

Bangladesh: NGO-led transformation and the fight for gender parity 🔗

Few countries in the developing world have made as dramatic a shift in female enrollment as Bangladesh. By the early 2000s, female enrollment at the secondary level had matched – and in some cases exceeded – that of boys, a feat that few low-income countries had managed. This shift was driven in large part by the Female Secondary School Stipend Program (FSSSP), launched nationally in 1994, which provided cash stipends to girls enrolled in secondary school conditional on regular attendance and remaining unmarried until graduation.

Current government initiatives include compulsory primary education, free education for girls up to class 10, nationwide stipends for female students, and the free distribution of textbooks from class 5 through class 12. Bangladesh has also achieved a primary school net enrollment rate of approximately 98%. The 2022 census recorded a national literacy rate of 74.66%.

The BRAC model: a global benchmark 🔗

The most celebrated actor in Bangladesh’s education story is not the government but a non-governmental organization. BRAC’s education program began in 1985 with just 22 one-room schools and has since expanded to reach 470 of Bangladesh’s 490 sub-districts across all 64 districts. Today, over 14 million children have graduated from BRAC’s pre-primary and primary schools, and 55% of those attending BRAC’s schools, clubs, and centers are girls and women. The BRAC model is now replicated in Afghanistan, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, and Pakistan.

Despite this progress, challenges persist. Student dropout rates from formal schools remain high, partly because of poverty and costs associated with accessing education, and teacher-student ratios can reach as high as 51:1 in some schools. Rural areas continue to lag behind urban centers in quality of instruction, infrastructure, and learning outcomes.

Bhutan: education in the service of happiness 🔗

Bhutan takes an approach to education unlike any other country in the SAARC region. Rather than measuring progress purely through enrollment data or literacy statistics, Bhutan frames its entire education system around the national philosophy of Gross National Happiness (GNH). The GNH framework was formally introduced into the Bhutanese education system in 2010 through the “Green Schools for Green Bhutan” initiative, incorporating values such as national etiquette, environmental responsibility, and social bonding. Students study environmental conservation, cultural preservation, and emotional well-being alongside conventional academic subjects.

Bhutan provides free education from primary through tertiary levels. It has achieved nearly universal primary education over time, and the gap between male and female, as well as urban and rural, enrollment rates has narrowed significantly. However, the country faces structural hurdles. Bhutan’s adult literacy rate stands at just 67%, and the country has one of the highest proportions of primary school-age children not attending school, despite spending approximately a quarter of total government expenditure on education.

Geographic isolation is a core challenge. Bhutan’s mountainous terrain makes delivering education to remote communities extremely difficult. The government has responded with community schools, boarding facilities for students from distant villages, and mobile teaching units for the most isolated areas. Non-formal literacy programs have also been deployed to reach adults in villages where formal schooling was never established.

India: the scale of reform and the learning quality gap 🔗

India operates one of the largest education systems on earth. India has approximately 21 million students enrolled in nearly 700 universities and 40,000 colleges. Since independence, the country has made significant strides in expanding access, and India’s literacy rate rose from approximately 65% in 2001 to around 77% by 2017, aided by universal education policies.

Key legislative milestones 🔗

The cornerstone of modern Indian education policy is the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE), 2009, which made education a fundamental right for all children aged 6 to 14. By 2018, overall school enrollment had reached 97.2%, there was a marked increase in the enrollment of girls in primary and secondary education, and the proportion of schools with usable girls’ toilets had doubled to 66.4%. The RTE Act also mandates that private schools reserve 25% of seats for students from economically weaker sections.

Supporting the RTE Act is the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), launched in 2001 to universalize elementary education. School enrollment in primary grades soared and infrastructure expanded rapidly under SSA, but foundational learning remained largely invisible to planners. A 2005 Pratham ASER report was a wake-up call: 72% of Grade 3 children could not read a Grade 2 text, and 68% could not perform basic subtraction. This led to the recognition that “schooling is not equal to learning.”

The quality challenge 🔗

India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 acknowledged this crisis directly, explicitly stating that over 50 million children in elementary school had not attained foundational literacy and numeracy. Despite high enrollment, ASER surveys indicate persistent gaps in basic reading and arithmetic, and only about 45% of rural youth aged 14-18 have basic arithmetic skills. Rural-urban disparities, teacher shortages, and varying quality of private versus public schools remain unresolved tensions in the system.

Maldives: near-universal access with new quality challenges 🔗

The Maldives stands out in the SAARC context as a small island nation that has achieved what most of its neighbors are still working toward. With local literacy initiatives dating back to the 1980s and continuing through the 1990s, the Maldives has reported a 98.94% literacy rate – one of the highest in South Asia. The country achieved universal access to primary education by 2000, in line with UNESCO’s Education for All targets.

In 2015, the Maldives introduced an Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) National Curriculum, shifting focus from rote learning to competency-based teaching. The government’s Education Sector Plan 2019-2023 set four overarching goals including ensuring that all children from pre-school through Grade 12 are enrolled and learning, and addressing inequalities between the capital Malé and remote atoll communities.

The geography problem 🔗

The Maldives is an archipelago of more than 1,000 islands, and this geography creates a unique educational challenge. School attendance drops dramatically to 35% once children reach upper-secondary levels, and one of the main drivers of this is the lack of secondary-level learning opportunities in remote island communities – for many children, leaving home is the only way to complete secondary education. UNICEF and the Ministry of Education have been working to bridge this gap through digital learning innovations and satellite schools to reach students with disabilities and those on distant islands.

Nepal: community-driven recovery and the persistence of inequity 🔗

Nepal’s education story is one of dramatic improvement against the odds. According to World Bank data, Nepal raised its adult literacy rate from 21% in 1981 to 71% in 2021, and its youth literacy rate from 30% in 1981 to 94% in 2021 – a remarkable multi-decade transformation. As of 2021, Nepal’s overall literacy rate was 76.3%, with 83.6% for males and 69.4% for females.

Community participation has been central to this success. Parent-Teacher Associations, School Management Committees, and local NGOs have rebuilt and maintained schools in ways that government programs alone could not. Over the five years of the World Bank-supported School Sector Development Program, the survival rate to Grade 12 increased from 11.5% in 2016 to 33.1% in 2022, with girls’ survival rates (33.9%) actually exceeding that of boys. The 2015 earthquake, which destroyed thousands of schools, tested the country’s resilience severely, but reconstruction efforts – many led by civil society – helped restore educational continuity.

Persistent gaps 🔗

Significant inequity remains within Nepal’s education sector: only 12% of children from the lowest wealth quintile are developmentally on track in literacy and numeracy, compared to 65% from the highest wealth quintile. Deep-rooted discrimination based on gender and caste, insufficient accommodation for children with different mother tongues, poverty, and a lack of school monitoring and accountability remain key barriers identified by Nepal’s own Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology. The Global Partnership for Education has noted that while a child in Nepal on average receives 6.7 years of schooling – above many regional neighbors – disaggregating by gender, location, caste, and socioeconomic status reveals groups of disadvantaged girls with fewer than two years of schooling on average.

Pakistan: the most urgent education crisis in the region 🔗

Pakistan faces the most severe education challenge in the SAARC group. Over 25 million children are currently out of school in Pakistan, and nearly 77% of ten-year-olds are unable to read or comprehend a simple sentence – a statistic that reflects a systemic failure spanning decades. Pakistan holds the unfortunate distinction of having the second-highest number of out-of-school children in the world.

The roots of the crisis are structural: low government investment in education (estimated at below 1% of GDP in recent years), a deeply fragmented system split across provinces after the 18th Constitutional Amendment, socio-economic poverty, child labor, and persistent gender gaps in rural areas. Pakistan’s constitution under Article 25A guarantees free and compulsory education to all children aged 5 to 16, and the Prime Minister declared a National Education Emergency in May 2024 to address the twin crises of out-of-school children and poor learning outcomes.

Reform initiatives and their limits 🔗

Despite the scale of the crisis, there are reform efforts worth noting. The Punjab Education Foundation, a public-private partnership model, provides subsidies to low-cost private schools serving disadvantaged communities and has expanded access in underserved areas of the country’s most populous province. The Federal Foundational Learning Policy was launched in June 2024, focusing on improving teacher quality, assessment systems, and the availability of learning materials. International partners including the Schools2030 program are also working directly with teachers to shift away from rote memorization toward child-centered, active learning approaches.

However, elite private institutions remain largely inaccessible to lower-middle-class and rural populations, and the majority living in rural Pakistan are left to manage education with inadequate resources and little central support. Without a sustained increase in public investment and political will, incremental reforms will struggle to address the depth of the problem.

Common threads and diverging paths 🔗

Across these six countries, several patterns emerge. Gender parity has improved most dramatically in Bangladesh and Maldives, while Nepal has made notable strides; Pakistan and parts of India’s rural belt continue to see girls disproportionately excluded from secondary and higher education. NGOs have stepped into the gaps that governments have left – BRAC in Bangladesh is the global benchmark, but similar civil society actors are critical in Nepal, Pakistan, and India. Rural-urban disparity is a shared problem: whether it is remote atolls in the Maldives, mountain communities in Bhutan and Nepal, or interior rural districts in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, geography remains a barrier that policy alone cannot overcome.

Perhaps the most common finding is that enrollment is not the same as learning. India’s ASER data, Nepal’s equity gaps, and Pakistan’s reading crisis all point to the same conclusion: getting children into schools is only the first step. For the first time in India’s history, the NEP 2020 declared foundational learning – not just schooling – an urgent national mission, a shift that other SAARC countries are also beginning to reflect in their own policy documents. The question facing all six nations is the same: how to make the transition from access to genuine quality, at scale, for the most disadvantaged children.

What do you think? Given that NGOs like BRAC have often outperformed government programs in expanding education access and gender equity, what does this suggest about the role of the state in public education reform? And as countries like India and Nepal shift their focus from enrollment numbers to actual learning outcomes, what structural changes do you think are most critical to making that shift real for children in rural and marginalized communities?

References

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