Speakers want skills linked to jobs, markets, credit and childcare, as official data show even highly educated Pakistani women struggle to find work.
ISLAMABAD:Pakistan’s women’s empowerment schemes are training women without getting enough of them into paid work, speakers said at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute’s (SDPI) 29th Sustainable Development Conference. They urged programmes to link skills to jobs, markets and finance, and to account for the unpaid care work that keeps many women at home.
Chairing the session on women’s skills and livelihoods, PML-N lawmaker Shaista Pervaiz Malik named industry-relevant skills, public safety, links to markets and access to capital as the priorities for raising women’s economic participation.
The numbers behind the plea
Rehan Saeed, executive general manager and chief executive of L’Oréal Pakistan, said women made up about half of Pakistan’s population but only around 24 percent of them were in the labour force. That matches the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics’ Labour Force Survey 2024-25, which put female participation at 24.4 percent under the older definition and 22.7 percent under current international standards, against nearly 70 percent for men.
The survey also shows why training alone falls short. Nearly one in four highly educated women in Pakistan is unemployed, according to an analysis of the same data. Gallup Pakistan’s review found women’s work is still shaped by domestic responsibilities, restricted mobility, safety concerns and social norms.
Saeed said that, in L’Oréal’s experience with its community programmes, skills training was most useful when combined with employment, mentoring and business support. The company’s programmes include vocational beauty training for survivors of domestic violence and acid attacks, run with the Depilex Smileagain Foundation, and digital and financial literacy courses for home-based entrepreneurs. Earlier this week, L’Oréal Pakistan won SDPI’s award for women’s economic empowerment.
Harassment and trust
Punjab Women Ombudsperson Dr Najma Afzal praised L’Oréal’s work on vocational skills, digital and financial literacy, and street harassment, saying it supported women’s dignity and economic independence. She called for workplace harassment laws to be enforced properly and said government institutions should lead by example, including by making sure women trust their complaint mechanisms.
The ombudsperson’s office hears complaints under Pakistan’s law on harassment of women at the workplace. Safety in public spaces has been a recurring issue in Lahore, where the city recently installed panic buttons on footbridges and the chief minister gave police four weeks to curb crimes against women.
Public health and gender justice expert Dr Rakhshinda Perveen said there was a dire need to remove the legal, institutional, social and economic barriers that keep women out of the workforce.
Lessons from Vietnam and Punjab
UNDP Deputy Resident Representative Van Nguyen pointed to an initiative in Vietnam that supports women micro-entrepreneurs through 100 cooperatives, connecting them with digital tools, markets and mentors. Economic empowerment, she said, should give women more security, choice and control over what they earn.
Jahan Ara Manzoor Wattoo, former vice chairperson of the Punjab Social Protection Authority, presented Punjab’s Khud Mukhtar programme as an example of support at grassroots level. Under the scheme, young married couples receive productive assets worth up to Rs150,000, such as livestock, tools or business equipment.
Khud Mukhtar is part of the Punjab Human Capital Investment Project and targets young parents in households enrolled in the Benazir Income Support Programme. Couples complete labour-market readiness training before receiving assets, followed by coaching. By the programme’s own figures, 4,042 households had earlier received Rs72,000 each, with another 5,958 set to receive productive assets. Those numbers are small next to the scale of the problem.
The message from the session was consistent: training needs to come with jobs, safe transport, childcare and credit. Lenders working with women make a similar case; Hyderabad’s SAFCO, whose founder was this week named runner-up for leadership at UN Women’s first Pakistan WEPs Awards, combines loans with training through a women’s incubation centre.
None of the speakers gave a target or timeline for increasing women’s participation in the labour force, which has stayed between about 20 and 24 percent since 2008.
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