CECAN Fellowship: Translating Risk-Based Insights into Policy for Tackling Educational Inequality in Pakistan
Despite decades of investment, Pakistan continues to face a persistent crisis of out-of-school children (OOSC), with over 26 million children unenrolled. Traditional policy responses have narrowly focused on enrolment drives, often overlooking the complex and systemic nature of educational exclusion. My research reconceptualizes non-enrolment as a product of distributed risks—structural (e.g., inadequate infrastructure, poverty) and agency-related (e.g., social norms, parental willingness)—which are unevenly distributed across gender, geography, and socioeconomic status. This fellowship addresses the challenge of integrating complexity-sensitive, risk-based frameworks into policy evaluation and design. With support from CECAN mentors, the project will: 1. Refine indicators that capture both structural and agency-related risks; 2. Explore evaluation strategies that surface power dynamics, interdependencies, and long-term feedback loops; 3. Develop practical tools to assess how interventions affect different risk profiles; and 4. Translate these insights into policy recommendations, briefing papers, and stakeholder communication strategies to support more targeted, equity-oriented education policies. By applying complexity science and the sociology of risk to education policy, this work aims to build more responsive, context-aware approaches to tackling the OOSC crisis, informing policy not just on who is excluded, but why, and how to intervene effectively.
About Minha
Minha Khan is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. She is a Sociologist of Education by training, with a particular focus on opportunity, equity, and constraints in education systems. Her work lies at the intersection of research, policy, and design to promote equitable access to education. Her research has previously explored how schooling in a child’s non-native language can make learning inaccessible, how household and gender norms complicate accessing higher education for female students, and the impact of funding and governance on the success of schools. Her PhD at the University of Cambridge focuses on the risks and future life chances of out-of-school children in her home country, Pakistan. Prior to her degree at Cambridge, Minha completed her MSc in Social Policy at the University of Oxford (2023) and BA in Sociology and Education at Stanford University (2021).
