Freelancing Built Pakistan's IT Exports. It Can't Sustain Them Alone Individual freelancers now generate a quarter of Pakistan's IT exports and are on track to cross $1 billion a year — but the government's $10 billion export target needs a kind of growth that hourly gig work was never built to deliver.

Abstract

Every month, hundreds of thousands of newly trained Pakistanis log into Upwork, Fiverr, and Payoneer for the first time. Between July 2025 and March 2026 alone, that workforce sent home $856 million in foreign exchange from computer and IT services — a 50 percent jump on the year before, and enough to cover roughly one in every four dollars of Pakistan's IT export earnings.

That growth is real, and it deserves the credit it gets. But the government's own "Uraan Pakistan" plan calls for IT exports to reach $10 billion by FY2029 — more than double this year's expected $4.5 billion. Getting there will require a kind of export Pakistan has not yet built at scale: one based on products, platforms, and companies, not hours billed by individuals working alone.