Barrister Danyal Chaudhry called for urgent prioritization of child investments in the upcoming federal budget while speaking at a pre-budget roundtable organised by UNICEF with the SDGs Secretariat and SDPI. He stressed that children make up more than 40 percent of Pakistan’s population, yet public funding for child-focused sectors remains inadequate and misaligned with needs.
Presenting recent fiscal trends for FY2025-26, Barrister Danyal noted that social protection spending rose by 20.7 percent largely due to expanded BISP coverage, while allocations for education recorded only marginal increases. Health funding fell sharply from PKR 52.13 billion to PKR 31.97 billion, and primary and preventive healthcare accounted for roughly 10 percent of expenditure on tertiary care, a gap that undermines maternal and child health outcomes.
He highlighted that Pakistan currently spends about 0.9 percent of GDP on health, far below the World Health Organization target of 5 percent, and that education investment remains below half of UNESCO’s recommended 4 to 6 percent of GDP. These funding shortfalls are reflected in outcomes where an estimated 77 percent of ten-year-olds face learning poverty and around one in three children under five experience stunting.
The roundtable, titled Child-Focused Social Sector Investments with Examples from Provinces – Challenges, Opportunities and Gaps, convened parliamentarians and policy experts for evidence-based discussion on priorities for FY2026-27. Participants examined opportunities to reprioritise within existing budgets, enhance absorptive capacity to utilise unspent development funds, and consider innovative financing mechanisms to scale up child investments.
Barrister Danyal urged Parliament to adopt a more proactive role in scrutinising and shaping allocations for children, linking policy debate to measurable outcomes in health, nutrition and learning. He added that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting will ensure transparent dissemination of budget deliberations to improve public understanding and foster accountability around child investments.
Speakers at the event emphasised that improved targeting of resources, stronger provincial examples, and better coordination between social protection, education and health programmes can deliver quicker gains for children without necessarily increasing total spending immediately. The roundtable underscored the need for durable budgetary commitments to protect the next generation and to align fiscal choices with Pakistan’s development goals.
