Most countries that talk about freedom do so in slogans. Pakistan, for the first time in its history, has done something more difficult: it has measured it. Mishal Pakistan’s State of Freedom Report 2026, released in its capacity as the World Economic Forum’s Country Partner Institute, is neither propaganda nor an indictment dressed up as research. It is something rarer in our political culture: an honest mirror.
This report deserves to be read carefully, debated publicly, and, most importantly, acted upon. Because what it reveals is a nation that is neither the failed state its critics describe nor the unqualified success its defenders sometimes claim. It is a country whose Constitution promises one thing, and whose citizens experience something adjacent to it, close in places, distant in others. That gap, honestly measured for the first time, is now Pakistan’s to close.
A Nation That Has Already Changed Faster Than Its Institutions
Pakistan’s population has crossed 245 million. Sixty-four per cent of that population is under 30. This is not a demographic footnote; it is the central fact around which every other finding in this report must be read.
This is a generation that has never known a Pakistan without mobile phones. Over 195 million mobile connections. 145 million broadband users. More than 230,000 kilometres of fibre network have been laid across the country. IT and freelance exports have crossed $3 billion, earned, overwhelmingly, by young Pakistanis working from bedrooms, shared offices, and university hostels, competing in a global digital economy that did not exist in any meaningful form for their parents’ generation.
This is a country that has digitally modernised faster than its institutions have adapted to govern that modernisation. And that mismatch, between a connected, globally aware youth population and institutions still calibrated to an earlier Pakistan, is the quiet undercurrent running through every number in this report.
Where Pakistan Should Feel Genuine Pride
Let us be clear about something: Pakistan’s story is too often told only in terms of crisis. This report pushes back against that, not through spin, but through data.
Seventy-seven per cent of Pakistanis feel free to choose their own profession. Seventy-five per cent hold a positive view of their freedom to conduct business. Seventy-five per cent expressed satisfaction with the opportunities available to women. Sixty-five per cent expressed satisfaction with religious freedom and the protection of religious rights, in a country that hosts approximately 600,000 mosques, 36,000 madrassas, 2,000 churches, and hundreds of temples and gurdwaras, an infrastructure of religious coexistence that few countries of comparable size and complexity can match.
These numbers matter. They represent the lived experience of the majority of Pakistanis on questions that go to the heart of what freedom means in daily life: the freedom to work, to build, to worship, to participate. A country where three-quarters of citizens report this kind of freedom is not a country defined by repression. It is a country whose successes are simply less visible, domestically and internationally, than its struggles.
PAYF’s youth readership in particular should sit with the 75 per cent figure on women’s opportunities. It does not mean the work is done; the report itself notes women are 20 per cent less likely than men to own a mobile phone, a gap with real consequences in a digital economy. But it means the trajectory is one that a majority of Pakistanis, including women themselves, perceive as moving in the right direction. That perception is worth protecting and building on, not dismissing.
Where Pakistan Must Look Harder at Itself
What separates this report from a public relations exercise is precisely what it does not hide.
Fifty-eight per cent of Pakistanis carry concerns about financial security. Sixty-two per cent feel they have limited influence over government decisions. Only 35 per cent are optimistic about the country’s direction. Only 34 per cent consider market competition reasonably fair.
These figures sit in direct tension with the freedoms reported elsewhere, and that tension is the story. A citizen can feel free to choose their profession and still feel that the profession offers no financial security. A citizen can feel free to practice their faith and still feel powerless to influence the government that governs them. Freedom, this report makes clear, is not one thing. It is a bundle of conditions, and Pakistan currently delivers some of them far more reliably than others.
The justice system numbers demand particular attention. Over 59,000 cases are pending before the Supreme Court. More than 450,000 are pending in the high courts. Over 1.74 million are pending in district courts. For the ordinary Pakistani whose land dispute, inheritance case, or criminal matter sits somewhere in those numbers, the constitutional right to a fair and timely hearing exists, but the practical experience of it does not.
Prison overcrowding tells the same story from a different angle. Punjab’s prisons hold 166 percent of intended capacity. Sindh holds 161 per cent. These numbers represent thousands of individuals, many awaiting trial, not convicted of anything, held in conditions that the same Constitution which guarantees their dignity does not, in practice, protect.
And the blasphemy data must be confronted directly, not euphemised. Approximately 344 blasphemy allegations were reported in 2024, 243 against Muslims, 101 against non-Muslims, concentrated heavily in Punjab and Sindh. In a country where 65 per cent of citizens report satisfaction with religious freedom, the persistence of these allegations at this scale, and their disproportionate weight on minority communities, represents precisely the kind of gap this report exists to identify. PAYF does not believe acknowledging this undermines Pakistan’s religious freedom record; we believe ignoring it would.
The Digital Paradox Pakistan Cannot Afford to Ignore
Here is the finding that should concern policymakers most, because it touches every other finding in the report.
Pakistan has built extraordinary digital infrastructure, and 55 per cent of its citizens do not trust the information that flows through it. Facebook accounts for 24 per cent of public information consumption, WhatsApp 19.9 per cent, websites 18 per cent, and X 15 per cent. This is where 64 per cent of Pakistanis under 30 are forming their views of government, of each other, and of the world.
A population that has migrated its political and social discourse onto platforms it does not trust is a population vulnerable to exactly the kind of manipulation, division, and despair that erodes the optimism this report is trying to measure. This is not uniquely a Pakistani problem; it is a global one. But for a country with Pakistan’s demographic profile, the quality of its digital information environment is not a side issue. It is close to the central governance challenge of the next decade.
What PAYF Takes From This Report
The report’s own closing list of future challenges, climate change, cybersecurity, misinformation, water scarcity, urban population growth, youth unemployment, and economic inequality, should not be read as a list of Pakistan’s failures. It should be read as Pakistan’s agenda, written by Pakistanis, about Pakistan, for the first time with numbers attached.
Forty-five per cent of respondents believe gender, religious, and ethnic equality is improving. That is not a small number, in a country whose internal divisions are constantly amplified by external commentary, a near-majority believing in improvement on these specific fronts is a signal of resilience that deserves more attention than it typically receives.
What this report ultimately demonstrates is a population that is neither in denial about its problems nor despairing about its future. Pakistanis are evaluating their institutions with clear eyes, reporting genuine freedom where they experience it, and genuine frustration where they do not. That is not the profile of a country in decline. It is the profile of a country capable of reform, because it can already see, with unprecedented clarity, exactly where reform is needed.
The Conversation Pakistan Owes Itself
A country of 245 million people, nearly two-thirds of them under 30, connected by fibre and mobile networks that did not exist a generation ago, has now produced the first honest measurement of the distance between what it promises its citizens and what it delivers.
That distance is real. The judicial backlog is real. The prison overcrowding is real. The blasphemy allegations are real. The 62 per cent who feel powerless before their own government are real.
But so are the 77 per cent who feel free to choose their work. So are the 75 per cent who believe in their freedom to build a business. So is the religious infrastructure that spans every faith community in this country. So are the 45 per cent who believe equality is improving.
PAYF’s message to Pakistan’s policymakers is simple: this report is not a verdict. It is a baseline. The first State of Freedom Report has started a conversation Pakistan has long needed to have with itself, honestly, with numbers, without the defensiveness or the despair that usually accompanies discussions of where this country stands.
The work of closing the gaps this report documents belongs to everyone, to the state, to civil society, and to the 64 per cent of Pakistanis who are under 30 and who will spend the rest of their lives living with whatever Pakistan decides to do with what it has just learned about itself.
