Khanzadi Kapri has lived through this three times.

In 2011, when the floods came to her village in Mirpurkhas, the schools went underwater. Her education was disrupted, saved only because her father, a teacher, turned their home into a classroom. Her siblings studied at the kitchen table while the rest of the village waited for the water to subside.

In 2022, the floods came back. Then again, in 2024. Each time, Kapri watched the same thing happen. Girls would return to school when the waters receded. They would sit in classrooms with no roofs, with broken furniture, with teachers who showed up on some days and not on others.

“There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of girls who completed grade five but never enrolled in grade six,” Kapri recounts. “Climate-related disasters do not just interrupt education temporarily. For many girls, they permanently change the course of their lives.” Kapri has witnessed this herself and has been trying to do something about it. She is now the founder of Aurat Sujag, a grassroots feminist initiative working on gender equality and climate justice in rural Sindh.

However, while it is a primary concern, the problem extends far beyond the rebuilding of the material infrastructure after the havoc caused by flooding. For instance, the girls’ school in Kapri’s village was supposedly ‘rebuilt’ and had a new flag hoisted outside it by late 2023, as if to signal that this institution exists, that it is counted, that it appears on a government spreadsheet somewhere as a functioning educational facility. It had walls, it had, nominally, a teacher assigned to it. It had been rebuilt, or partially rebuilt, with the kind of speed that post-disaster funding cycles demand.

What it did not have, for months at a stretch, was any teacher physically present there, or a roof over the rear classroom. Or girls above the age of 12 sitting inside it. But according to the data, the school existed. And according to the data, the girls had come back.

Four years after Pakistan was wrecked by catastrophic, record-breaking floods, some of the girls’ schools that were destroyed by the flooding have been ‘rebuilt’ on paper. Yet, across rural Sindh, damaged classrooms, a dearth of functioning toilets, absent teachers and silent dropouts reveal how girls continue to fall through the cracks of a post-flood recovery measured by numbers rather than lives

Four years after Pakistan was wrecked by catastrophic, record-breaking floods, some of the girls’ schools that were destroyed by the flooding have been ‘rebuilt’ on paper. Yet, across rural Sindh, damaged classrooms, a dearth of functioning toilets, absent teachers and silent dropouts reveal how girls continue to fall through the cracks of a post-flood recovery measured by numbers rather than lives

THE IMPACT OF THE FLOODS ON GIRLS’ EDUCATION

The 2022 monsoon floods were the worst in Pakistan’s recorded history. One-third of the country was submerged. Sindh was the most devastated province, as communities were swept away, roads destroyed, crops lost and schools, thousands of them, reduced to ruins or left standing as shells. The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) reported at the time that the floods had put millions of children out of school overnight.

Then came the recovery narrative, as international donors pledged funds. According to a 2024 Global Partnership for Education document, 1,667 temporary learning centres were established across Sindh, 1,432 with Unicef support. The Sindh government reviewed district-level damage data and reconstruction began.

But, as of early 2026, 14,343 schools across Sindh, out of more than 19,500 damaged in 2022, are still awaiting reconstruction — as was disclosed following a meeting this March between Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah, Sindh Education Minister Syed Sardar Shah and Secretary School Education Zahid Abbasi, among others.

Pakistan’s education spending dropped to approximately 0.8 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the fiscal year 2024-2025, a record low, according to the Pakistan Economic Survey 2025-26. This number is far below the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) benchmark of four-six percent, and far below what is needed to rebuild what the floods erased in rural Sindh.

The Sindh budget presented for the 2026-27 fiscal year does little to close that gap. Overall education spending has climbed, on paper, to over Rs600 billion, but the money tied specifically to fixing what the floods destroyed remains a footnote: just over Rs234 million earmarked for restoring flood-damaged schools, against more than 14,000 buildings still in ruin. The province’s development allocation for education was cut by roughly a third this cycle, even as officials........

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