The price of political Islam

by Ayesha Khan

RAWA's rally against Taliban in Peshawar, 1998
Photo credit: Wikipedia/RAWA

Why does it come as no surprise to us in Pakistan that Tashfeen Malik spent significant time in Saudi Arabia and was a student at al-Huda in Multan? Because we already know that violent extremism in the name of Islam has been fostered in our country through external funding and religious education emanating from these sources, much as they care to deny this on the international stage. So what are we, ordinary men and women whose lives have been changed by this phenomenon to varying degrees in Muslim countries over the last few decades, doing to stop it?

Politics and social change

by Haris Gazdar

Pakistan's youngest political prisoner: 4 year old MRD activist Fraz Wahlah, 1985
Photo credit: Wikipedia

Last Saturday, I spoke at a panel discussion - “Pakistan: fossilized or quietly transforming” at the 2015 Khayaal Festival. Dr. Ali Cheema who teaches economics at the LUMS and conducts research at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS) and the Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP) moderated the discussion. I was privileged to share the panel with the distinguished demographer and social scientist Dr Zeba Sathar who heads the Pakistan country office of the Population Council in Pakistan and does pathbreaking work on fertility and demographic trends.

Has Pakistan changed, or is it caught in a rut? Ali Cheema introduced this question using the work of two commentators on Pakistan, William Easterly and Anatol Lieven. Easterly wonders why Pakistan lags behind in so many social indicators of education, health, and women’s empowerment despite having a relatively educated and sophisticated elite, and having produced many individuals who excel in the professions globally. Lieven characterizes Pakistan as being “governed by the traditions of overriding loyalty to family, clan and religion... a highly conservative, archaic... inert mass of different societies".

How old are you?

by Azmat Budhani and Hussain Bux Mallah

The first National Identity Card issued in Pakistan

Many of us field researchers have had frustrating and at times amusing experiences probing respondents’ ages. For most types of household surveys we need to fill out a family roster which includes an age column where we record the age of each household member. Recording this data is not an easy job because a respondent is often unaware of his or her own precise age, let alone the ages of other household members. This shows up as discrepancies in the data. An adult son, for instance, might have been noted as 25 years and his mother’s age will be recorded as 35, implying that the mother gave birth to her son when she was 10 years old. Clustering of ages around multiples of five years has been reported across surveys in Pakistan and other countries with similar conditions. Although researchers have many tricks to get to the year of birth within certain margins of error, accurate recording of the actual date of birth remains a challenge.

Quality Measures

by Sidra Mazhar

Photo Credit: Collective for Social Science Research 

Stunting and wasting, which measure respectively, height-for-age and weight-for-height shortfalls among children are well-established indicators of nutritional status of a population. These statistics, part of a branch of measurement known as anthropometrics (literally, the measurement of people), are widely used to reflect on progress and direct policies. We know, for example, that the rates of stunting and wasting in Pakistan are recognized as being above UNICEF’s emergency threshold levels. While there have been many debates about what these statistics signify and how they might improve, how we actually arrive at the numbers is often taken for granted.

Can social protection programmes lead to greater economic agency for women in agriculture?

by Amna Akhtar

Photo credit: Magnus Wolfe-Murra/DFID/Flickr

Even though women in rural areas in Pakistan take part in a wide range of agricultural activities, the work they do, often arduous and labor-intensive, is not recognized as their individual contribution to the household economy. There exist strong gendered norms around the kinds of work that can be considered paid work for women in agriculture and except for some - such as cotton harvesting and livestock rearing-income from most kinds of work are attributed to the household as a whole. This, we found, while researching linkages between women's work in agriculture and the nutrition outcomes. This is important because we found a clear connection between the recognition or even acknowledgement of women’s economic contribution and their ability to make pro-nutrition consumption decisions. Interestingly, income from the national cash transfer programme (Benazir Income Support Programme or BISP) whose beneficiaries are women in poor households was seen across the board as the woman’s own. If the design of social protection programmes can enhance the visibility of women as autonomous economic agents they may even lead to greater recognition of women’s work in agriculture. This is one of the questions we hope to address in our research on mitigating the negative and leveraging the positive impacts of women’s agricultural work on nutrition.


This blog originally appeared on LANSA

Making value chains work for little children

by Samar Zuberi

Photo Credit: Wikipedia/Scanned from 1000 Fragen an die Natur, via The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1948.

In Pakistan, 44 per cent of children under the age of five are stunted while 15 per cent are wasted and 32 per cent are underweight (NNS, 2011). These statistics indicate that malnutrition is a serious problem in Pakistan - according to World Health Organisation classifications Pakistan falls in the ‘very high’ range for severity of malnutrition for all three figures. The occurrence of micronutrient deficiency is also alarmingly high with half of the population of children under 5 suffering from anaemia and vitamin A deficiency, while 39 per cent are deficient in zinc (NNS, 2011).

Despite the high proportion of the population that is involved in agriculture (45 per cent of the workforce) many rely on the market to purchase their food. Seventy-seven per cent of households are net buyers of wheat, the main food staple in the country. Good nutrition, however, is not just about having enough bread to fill your belly. It is about having a varied and nutritious diet with adequate levels of protein and micronutrients. And for nutritious foods the reliance on markets is even greater than it is for the main staples, in urban and rural areas alike. Understanding how markets can work better to deliver nutritious foods to the poor and undernourished, therefore, can help to improve diets and in turn nutrition.

Milk and money

by Hussain Bux Mallah and Haris Gazdar

Photo credit: ILRI/Stevie Mann/Flickr

The livestock sector plays an important role in the economy of Pakistan contributing 10.8 per cent of the GDP, with milk as the largest commodity, accounting for about 51 per cent of its total value. According to household surveys such as the Federal Bureau of Statistic’s Household Integrated Economic Survey or HIES, milk and milk products account for a quarter of total household consumption. Typically, surveys such as HIES ask respondents to recall the total amount of a commodity consumed by the household in a reference period. If that commodity has not been bought then its value is imputed by applying local market prices to the amount consumed, before reporting it as part of the household budget. So the economic value of milk is measured using the yardstick of a market transaction.