Proposed National Indicator Framework for SDG 4: The Case of Pakistan

Education plays an important role in reducing vulnerability to economic, social and environmental dislocation and in developing more resilient systems. In 2030 global sustainable development agenda, goal 4 covers wide ranging aspects of education and learning including literacy assessment and childhood development. The SDG document proposes 7 main targets and 11 indicators to monitor the progress for this goal. However, the necessary data required for effective follow-up and review of the progress towards the implementation of many of the UN suggested indicators is not available in the context of Pakistan. The data gap analysis reveals that only 3 out of 11 indicators of SDG-4 may be estimated with the readily available data. Thus some initiatives in terms of policy formulation and new surveys are proposed for tracking the progress in implementing SDG-4. However, besides political will, these initiatives require lot of financial and human resources. The paper thus recommends to start the process of tracking SDG-4 with the mix of global and complementary national indicators for which reliable and national representative data is quickly available. This research note proposes implementable indicators of educational attainment and inequality and also provides baseline scenario for the year 2015. Overall, it is revealed that Pakistan is 61 percent of the way toward the targets (100%) in terms of proposed indicators related to SDG-4.