11,000 feet up in the mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan( GB), there is a village called Dapa. Snow closes it off for months at a time. The families who live there survive on agriculture and livestock. There is one small school available for girls. In another remote village, Malpan, the circumstances are much the same: isolation, limited resources, and a single small school.
In each of those schools, a woman teaches in the same classroom they once attended as a student. Each woman left her village to continue her education beyond grade 5, where both schools ended. Each graduated. And each, given the opportunity to build a life elsewhere, with paved roads and reliable electricity, chose to return home.
Their names are Shehnaaz Batool and Nusrat Fatima. Odds are slim they have ever met, but what they have in common is not a coincidence. It is the most important thing happening in education in the remote regions of Pakistan, and almost nobody outside these remote villages knows it is happening at all.
What a Remote School Cannot Do
Pakistan has between 25 and 26 million children out of school— roughly 38 % of the school-age population and one of the highest rates in the world.¹ Education spending has fallen to about 0.8 % of GDP, a record low, far below the UN-backed benchmark of 4 % to 6 %.² While school enrollment numbers in the Gilgit- Baltistan region are better than in other parts of the country, school attendance, especially among girls and poorer households, remains a challenge.
According to UNICEF, the net attendance rate among primary school aged children in GB is 47.4 %( 23 % among girls and 27 % for boys), meaning less than half of children attend primary school; among GB’ s poorer households, net attendance is only 36 %, meaning more than 60 % of children don’ t attend school at all. 3
The crisis may be measured in millions, but lasting change is measured one child at a time. In Dapa, the number that matters is not 26 million. It is one.
A village school at 11,000 feet, cut off by snow for a third of the year, cannot recruit teachers from the city.
28 | 2026-2027 JOURNEY OF HOPE
CENTRAL ASIA INSTITUTE