Population Briefs | October 2003, Vol. 9, No. 3 | Transitions to Adulthood: Broad Survey of Pakistani Youth Completed

Population Briefs: Reports on Population Council Research

October 2003, Vol. 9, No. 3

Transitions to Adulthood
Broad Survey of Pakistani Youth Completed

Pakistan currently has one of the largest cohorts of young people in its history, with approximately 25 million people between the ages of 15 and 24. Through the decisions they make and the opportunities they are offered, this group will play a crucial role in the social, political, and economic development and stability of the country. Young people in this age group face a number of critical life decisions as they negotiate the transition to adulthood: choices about leaving school, becoming employed, taking on greater responsibility, choosing a spouse, and starting a family.

Until recently, however, little was known about the details of the lives of Pakistani youth. Population Council investigators, as part of the organization’s research into transitions to adulthood around the world, sought to fill this knowledge gap. The researchers conducted the largest nationally representative survey ever to focus on this age group of Pakistanis. A total of 6,585 households in 254 communities were interviewed, including 4,530 adults (parents, where possible) and 8,074 young people. For the first time, Pakistani young people were asked directly about their lives, rather than having adults speak for them. The investigation yielded information about the state of education, work, and marriage and childbearing, among other insights.

“This survey’s findings should be translated into a social plan aimed at resolving health, education, and other problems that youth face,” states Pakistan’s Finance Minister, Shaukat Aziz, in a preface to a report of the survey’s findings. The report, Adolescents and Youth in Pakistan 2001–02: A Nationally Representative Survey, was published in July 2003.

Education
The need to set up high-quality, well-functioning schools for children of both sexes, but particularly for females in rural areas, was one of the foremost findings of the survey. Parents in Pakistan prefer to send their children to single-sex schools. However, the number of schools available to females at each level falls far short of the number of schools that are accessible to males, particularly in rural areas.

Roughly 50 percent of all females between ages 15 and 24 have ever enrolled in school. Furthermore, those who do attend are more likely to drop out at an earlier level than their male counterparts. This pattern of low enrollment for females is magnified among the poorest Pakistani youth. “There is evidence that school enrollment and attainment has increased for females in the last five years,” says Population Council deputy program manager Minhaj ul Haque, principal investigator for the survey in Pakistan. “However, the gains are small and the gender gap remains huge.”

Almost all males and females report ambitions for achieving higher educational levels than their parents attained, feeling that they should be educated to either the secondary or university level. “While we found that educational aspirations are high, actual education attainment levels are much lower. Poverty, lack of access, and poor school quality all contribute to this gap,” says Population Council director of social science research Cynthia Lloyd, a lead researcher.

Time use and work
Young males and young females in Pakistan, particularly those who are not in school, spend their time very differently. While most young men eventually enter the paid labor force outside the home, less than 40 percent of young women have entered the workforce by age 24. Females are most likely to work inside the home on domestic chores. These work arrangements reflect very different mobility patterns, with males being much freer than females to leave the home unaccompanied. But, “these young women are not idle,” states Zeba Sathar, Population Council country director in Pakistan and a lead investigator on the survey. “We found that at every age between 15 and 24, women work longer hours than men.” (See graph.)

Recently, however, there has been a slight rise in paid work among females ages 15–19 in comparison to the cohort born five years earlier. Most young people, men and women, work in agriculture. Other types of work are segregated by gender, with females engaged in stitching, embroidery, and knitting (largely based at home) while young men work in factories, are self-employed, or perform skilled labor. Young people’s attitudes about gender roles remain traditional, with well-defined lines between the domains of males and females.

Marriage and childbearing
The gap between the onset of puberty and the time of marriage for females and males is growing as a result of an increasing age at marriage. For females, however, there is little substantive, skills-enhancing activity to fill this growing gap. Females in rural areas continue to marry much earlier than those in urban areas. A rural adolescent female is more than twice as likely as her urban peer to be married before age 20 (58 percent versus 27 percent).

The birth of a child tends to follow fairly quickly upon marriage. Worryingly, “survey data indicate that females between the ages of 15 and 19 are receiving less antenatal care and are less likely to have a medically trained attendant at their first births than were females between the ages of 20 and 24,” says Council program associate Judith Diers, a researcher on the study. Thus, not only are younger women facing the dangers associated with early childbirth, but their risks are further elevated by less access to professional care before and during the birth.

The survey’s findings will likely inform Pakistan’s emerging national youth policy. In response to insights gleaned from the investigation, the Population Council plans to continue in-depth research into primary schooling opportunities in the country’s rural communities. “Although students at these schools are not yet adolescents, these establishments are of the utmost importance for ensuring positive and healthy transitions to adulthood among future generations,” says Barbara Ibrahim, Council regional director for West Asia and North Africa.

Economic growth and prosperity “are not automatic; they will depend on whether Pakistan succeeds in providing better education, minimizing the gender gap, and creating job opportunities for today’s adolescents and youth in the country,” emphasizes Finance Minister Aziz. Young people are no doubt the most important resource for the country's future, he notes. "But the government alone can't do it—we need the world of NGOs, we need the world of civil society, we need the world of philanthropy to help us achieve this goal."

Source
Sathar, Zeba A., Cynthia B. Lloyd, Minhaj ul Haque, Judith A. Diers, Azeema Faizunnissa, Monica Grant, and Munawar Sultana. 2003. Adolescents and Youth in Pakistan 2001-02: A Nationally Representative Survey. Islamabad, Pakistan: Population Council. (PDF; please note, this report is over 8 MB in size)

Outside funding
Department for International Development (UK), the Rockefeller Foundation, UNICEF/Pakistan, and the United Nations Population Fund.

To order Adolescents and Youth in Pakistan 2001–02: A Nationally Representative Survey, contact Khalid Mehmood (khalid@pcpak.org or Information Officer, Population Council, House No. 7, Street No. 62, Sector F-6/3, Islamabad 44000, Pakistan).

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