About 78% of Pakistani 10-year-olds cannot read/understand a simple age-appropriate text.
Source
World Bank — https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2025/10/17/fragile-gains-enduring-challenges-charting-pakistan-s-path-out-of-poverty. Verified in source set / retroactive normalization pending.
What it proves
Pakistan faces a learning crisis, not only an enrolment crisis.
What it does not prove: This is floor-level reading proficiency at a single age, measured largely among children who are enrolled — it tests whether a ten-year-old can read one age-appropriate passage, not the quality of secondary schooling or numeracy. Because the 25.1m out-of-school children are mostly outside the assessed cohort, a population-wide figure would be worse, not better, than 78%.
Memory hook: 78% → four in five ten-year-olds sit in school without reading
Rebuts the claim: "Get every Pakistani child into a classroom and the education crisis is solved."