When the floodwaters rose around her village in southern Punjab this summer, fourteen-year-old Ayesha thought she might miss a week of school at most. She remembers standing with her younger brother on a rooftop in her village near tehsil Dunyapur town of district Lodhran, pointing at the swollen river that had swallowed the road, their fields, and finally the single-storey school building that had been the heart of their community.
Within days the classrooms were under water, the chalkboard turned into a faint green blur beneath the murky tide, and the iron gate was carried away like a toy. When the water finally receded, there was nothing to go back to: the roof had collapsed, the furniture was gone, and the school was declared unsafe. Her parents told her she would have to walk several kilometres to another school in a neighbouring town. She did not go back.
Ayesha’s story is not unique. Over the past decade, Pakistan’s classrooms have been repeatedly swept away by floods. In 2010, more than 10 thousand schools across the country were damaged, according to UNESCO. Later disasters followed the same pattern: in 2022, over 17 thousand schools were affected, more than six thousand completely destroyed, and nearly three million children saw their education disrupted. For boys, the journey to a distant replacement school is a hardship but sometimes still possible; for girls, it is often the end of their schooling. Concerns about safety, lack of transport, and social expectations combine to drive parents to keep daughters at home. The floods therefore do more than destroy buildings — they extinguish opportunities, particularly for girls in rural Pakistan, where literacy rates remain stubbornly low.
This year has brought yet another crisis. In Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, the summer floods of 2025 damaged or destroyed nearly three thousand schools. Punjab’s Minister for School Education, Rana Sikandar Hayat, confirmed that three thousand schools were lost, severely affecting the education of hundreds of thousands of students. Some of the buildings remain under water weeks after the floods, their walls weakened and playgrounds turned into muddy ponds. The closures have disrupted the education of more than six hundred thousand children, among them an almost equal share of girls and boys. The scale is staggering: in some districts nearly half of all functioning schools are closed.
Minister Hayat acknowledged the depth of the crisis during a meeting with UNICEF’s Representative to Pakistan, Pernille Ironside, on Sept 25. The two discussed immediate steps to restore learning and long-term cooperation for resilience. Hayat explained that the department had already been struggling with shortages of classrooms, furniture, and teachers before the disaster struck. The floods, he said, “have destroyed thousands of schools, many of which are still under water. The department is now confronted with the challenge of rehabilitating these schools.” To prevent a total collapse in continuity, the government has begun running three shifts in surviving schools, so that displaced children can squeeze into already crowded classrooms. Tent schools are being erected in flood-hit areas, and in some cases private buildings are being rented temporarily. Authorities expect it will take three months to rehabilitate the damaged schools, though past experience suggests the process could be far slower.
To ease the burden on families, Punjab has waived examination fees for students in flood-affected areas and promised scholarships to help keep them in the system. But for many, these measures will not be enough. The journey to school itself has become impossible in villages where bridges were washed away or where the nearest functioning school is miles away. Parents who already struggle to meet daily expenses are unwilling to risk daughters’ safety or pay for transport. For them, the loss of a local school is the end of the line.
The pattern is painfully familiar. After the devastating floods of 2010, large numbers of schools across Sindh and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa were never fully rebuilt. Temporary shelters served as classrooms for years, until they too became unsafe. In Swat, recent floods left more than a hundred schools unusable, forcing teachers to conduct lessons in open grounds or half-collapsed buildings. In Sindh, the 2022 deluge damaged nearly half the province’s schools, including thousands of girls’ institutions. In many cases, the promised reconstruction has been delayed by bureaucracy, funding shortages, and competing emergencies.
Education experts warn that Pakistan cannot afford another lost generation. The literacy rate for women in rural areas is still below 40 per cent, and dropout rates after primary level remain among the highest in South Asia. Each school that disappears under floodwaters represents not only physical damage but the loss of fragile progress in reducing gender disparity. The Malala Fund has stressed that climate disasters are disproportionately harming girls’ education, as families under stress tend to pull girls out first.
The challenge now is to move beyond temporary fixes. Tents and rented halls may keep some children in class for a season, but they cannot replace safe, permanent schools. Nor can crowded three-shift systems provide quality learning when teachers are overworked and classrooms crammed with twice their normal size. Building back stronger is the refrain among policymakers, but in practice reconstruction often means patching walls or replacing roofs with the same vulnerable materials. Resilient infrastructure — elevated foundations, flood-resistant designs, proper drainage — is more expensive, yet without it, the cycle of destruction and repair will continue.
For families like Ayesha’s, the future hangs in the balance. She spends her days now helping her mother with household chores and looking after younger siblings. When asked if she hopes to return to school, she nods but her answer is uncertain. “If they open a school nearby again, I will go,” she says softly. Her father is less hopeful. “These things take years,” he explains. “We cannot wait forever.”
The floods of 2025 have once again washed away not just classrooms but a generation’s fragile hold on education. Unless governments — federal and provincial — treat school reconstruction as an emergency and partners like UNICEF sustain their support, Pakistan risks turning disasters into permanent scars. For the children who have lost their schools, time is not on their side. Every month out of class deepens the gap, and every kilometre further to school makes the dream of learning more distant.