No drama queen
EVERY so often my father and I watch a Pakistani drama together. It’s a good way for us to bond and also spend time away from news channels selling us…
Gendered toll of floods
Pakistan’s 2025 monsoon floods have once again unleashed a humanitarian disaster – and once again, women and girls are bearing an outsized burden. Reproductive healthcare has emerged as a critical…
A prayer and national security
‘MAY you have seven sons’ was a familiar prayer in Punjab in early 20th-century British India, when the Empire gave stipends to families with many male children. They were potential…
Theft of childhood
LAST month, I travelled through Pakistan’s four provinces to oversee UNFPA projects and initiatives. I also engaged with partners to get their perspectives on development amid the recent geopolitical and…
She dared to choose
In a remote clearing near Quetta, Balochistan, two lives were extinguished by bullets, their final moments captured on camera and circulated across the country. The woman, Bano Bibi, clutched a…
Aid-cut crisis
As the UN’s independent expert on poverty, I am no stranger to harrowing statistics. But few numbers have shaken me like those emerging in the wake of the Trump administration’s…
Criminalising child marriage
CHILD marriage persists in Pakistan for many reasons, and ending the practice requires measures that are sensitive to the problem’s complexity. Debates on child marriage tend to reduce this complexity…
Our healthcare workforce crisis
Imagine a country where a woman dies every 50 minutes from pregnancy-related complications. That’s not fiction – that’s Pakistan in 2024, according to the UNFPA. Now add a healthcare system…
Beyond the budget
Pakistan’s federal budget for FY25 must be seen not as an end, but a critical waypoint on a longer and more arduous journey towards a restructured, resilient and equitable economy.…
Defunding the world
In making America great again, the US is putting the final nail in the coffin of a world order it had put together, brick by brick after World War II.…
