Universities at the Core: How Pakistan’s Higher Education Sector Is Powering the IT Boom Pakistan’s universities are no longer just teaching computer science

Abstract

Pakistan’s information technology and IT-enabled services sector earned a record $3.8 billion in exports in FY2024-25, up roughly 18 percent year-on-year, and officials in Islamabad now expect the figure to climb to $4.5–4.6 billion by the end of FY2025-26. A decade ago, the entire sector exported under $1 billion a year. Behind almost every dollar of that growth sits a graduate — a programmer, a QA engineer, a cybersecurity analyst, or a freelance developer — who learned the fundamentals of computing somewhere on a Pakistani university campus before being absorbed into a Karachi software house, a Lahore start-up, or a remote team serving a client in London or Riyadh.