In Pakistan, around 23 million children do not attend school

According to the World Bank, 22.8 million children between the ages of five and 16 do not attend primary or secondary schools in Pakistan, accounting for 44% of the overall population.

Distance to schools and a lack of provision are two of the main reasons for children not attending school in rural areas, according to the bank's latest report "Cost-efficiency considerations for the completion of road networks in the open street map: a priority-based mapping approach applied in Pakistan." Poor development results are systematically connected to limited access to services and opportunities.

Furthermore, a lack of health facilities and great distances between them obstruct rural and impoverished households' access to these vital services. According to the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey, more than half of Pakistani households must drive more than two kilometres to access a health clinic or hospital, resulting in unequal health results.

According to the paper, precise spatial understanding of discrepancies in service accessibility is critical for devising targeted and cost-effective policies, initiatives, and projects to address them. While discrepancies are well-known and acknowledged, they are rarely quantified at the administrative levels where services are provided and investment decisions are made, limiting the effectiveness of interventions and resource allocation.

As a result, the World Bank's Pakistan Poverty and Equity team, in collaboration with the Pakistan Transport team, refined and used a high-resolution method to assess and depict service accessibility gaps at the Tehsil (third-level administrative unit) level in Pakistan. In the province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), this accessibility strategy was used to gain access to schools, healthcare facilities, and markets.

The accessibility modelling methodology is outlined in a recent poverty note and may be duplicated in various contexts for access to any form of service, opportunity, or other item of interest using the toolkit and materials accessible in the team's GitHub repository, it noted.