THE floods are visiting us again. The death toll will be counted within days. The damage to roads, bridges and embankments will be tallied within weeks and translated into a dollar figure. Expect this assessment to dominate the coverage. It is legitimate but a wrong ledger regardless. The real casualty of this flood, and the one before it, and the one before that, is not standing in the rubble. It is sitting in a classroom that no longer exists, or should be sitting there and is not.
Pakistan is a country where 40 per cent of the population is under 15, where 93 million children are of school age, where the state has for years spent less than one per cent of GDP on health and less than 2pc on education despite disasters. When the water recedes, the roads get rebuilt. The child who missed seven weeks of school, who was screened for severe acute malnutrition at a flood clinic, who caught malaria from a collapsed WASH system, does not get rebuilt on the same timeline. Evidence from the 2005 earthquake shows four weeks of closure can cost a child one and a half years of learning four years later. Pakistan has just handed its children five years of near continuous disruption: Covid, the 2022 floods, the 2024 heatwaves, the 2025 floods. Each calamity more severe than the last.
Before the 2022 floods, 26.2m children were already out of school, the second highest figure in the world. The floods destroyed or damaged 27,000 schools, converted 5,000 more into relief camps, and locked 3.5m children out of learning in a single season. By January 2023, only 200,000 had received any education intervention. The provincial numbers show that the out-of-school share jumped from 32 to 80pc in Khairpur Mirs and from 46 to 86pc in Jacobabad. Entire districts where enrolment simply stopped. The pattern held: 1,300 more schools damaged in 2024, 230,000 children in Sindh losing access, nearly 30,000 schools damaged in Punjab in 2025, affecting 700,000 more. Each cycle adds to the base rather than starting from zero. Displaced teachers, especially women, do not return to classrooms that no longer exist. The system absorbs the loss quietly, without a ledger.
Girls absorb this collapse first and hardest. Even before 2022, the out-of-school rate for girls aged five to 16 stood at 59pc in Balochistan and 51pc in Sindh. When a flood or a drought strips a household of income, a daughter’s schooling is usually the first expense cut, and marriage becomes a coping strategy. The 2022 floods alone are linked to an 18pc rise in child marriage prevalence — five years of progress erased in a single monsoon. The term now in the literature is ‘monsoon brides’. Researchers have traced the chain across South Asia: economic shock triggers withdrawal from school, withdrawal triggers marriage, and marriage closes the door on everything meant to follow. This is a girl absent from every flood damage assessment. The floodwaters recede but they leave monsoon brides behind.
Pakistan has handed its children five years of near continuous disruption.
The harm does not stop at school gates or wedding registers. After the 2022 floods, half of the 3.4m children needing assistance showed signs of psychological distress, and seven in 10 Sindh parents reported depressive symptoms in their children. Pakistan has no framework to recognise this as loss, no methodology to measure it, no mechanism to compensate for it.
The same demographic pressure that turns a flood into a generational event turns a heatwave into one too. Global tracking shows infants and children under five now experience more heatwave days per year than any other age group, a fourfold increase over two decades, and Pakistan’s heatwaves already exceed 50 degrees Celsius. In 2024, that exposure alone shuttered classrooms for roughly half of all school-age children. Unicef’s 2026 Children’s Climate Risk Report has found that 1.1 billion of the world’s children are now exposed to three or more climate hazards simultaneously, and named Pakistan among the countries most severely affected. We can layer this onto a country ranked 109th of 127 nations on the Global Hunger Index, where up to 40pc of children under five are stunted and a third of mothers are malnourished. A child entering a heatwave, drought or a flood in Pakistan is not entering it from a healthy baseline. He is already behind, and the event does not reset him to zero, it pushes him further back.
Pakistan cannot see the scale of what it is losing, because it is not counting it. None of the official estimates, including the 2022 Post-Disaster Needs Assessment or the 2026 lessons-learned reviews, has counted it. Child deaths from malaria, cholera and respiratory illness after floods are rarely registered and are thus invisible to policymakers. Regional modelling projects that sustained climate-related learning disruption could generate up to $380bn in lost future earnings by 2050, a figure absent from our projections. This is what the country loses when it fails to protect the children who are supposed to grow into its workforce, tax base and its institutions.
The way forward has to run in the same sequence as the damage, not around it. First, disaster relief funds need a mandatory child impact reporting requirement, tracking school closures, malnutrition screening, child marriage referrals and mortality alongside infrastructure damage, published on the same timeline as the damage assessment. Second, education recovery financing needs to be pre-positioned rather than requested after each disaster, a drawdown facility that can disburse within weeks and carries a funded protocol for keeping girls enrolled once household income collapses. Third, Pakistan needs to bring its own child climate risk data into climate finance negotiations, rather than relying on an external index to describe a crisis the state has not measured for itself.
Pakistan does not lack evidence of what is happening to its children. It lacks a mechanism, in its own data systems and in the loss and damage registry, to make that harm count.
Published in Dawn, July 30th, 2026.
