Omar Ashraf
Pakistan now has around 160 million broadband subscribers, and 69 per cent of its adult population is financially included. Both figures represent genuine infrastructure achievements. What they do not measure is whether citizens can actually use that infrastructure to live better lives, and that distinction is the difference between a digital economy and a dignified one.
The reason is structural. Pakistan’s digital economy has been measured, reported and incentivised around access. Getting people into the system counts. What they do inside it does not. Policy targets are written in terms of accounts opened, SIMs registered and agents enrolled.
Pakistan’s mobile wallets, digital accounts and agent networks were built for reach. That is what they delivered, and delivered at an impressive scale. Whether people use them, trust them or benefit from them was never the measure.
The moment to course-correct is now. Pakistan’s digital infrastructure is still being built. The National Financial Inclusion Strategy, the SBP’s payment systems agenda and the government’s Digital Pakistan Vision are all active frameworks shaping how the next 50 million users will experience the system.
This is the argument for a Dignified Digital Economy. A dignified digital economy measures participation by its depth and quality, not its volume alone. It asks whether citizens can use the system safely, understand its terms and extract real value from it.
That reorientation begins with how services are designed. Rather than optimising primarily for onboarding, every major citizen-facing digital platform should be required to map what happens when a user cannot complete a process. Consider the ordinary experience of a first-time mobile wallet user outside a major city, blocked by a biometric mismatch, referred to a helpline that loops without resolution, and left with an account she cannot access and money she cannot retrieve. The system recorded an onboarding. The user experienced a wall. This is what practitioners call the failure journey. A system that takes dignity seriously would measure how quickly that wall is removed, whether someone intervened and whether the user returned. Pakistan’s digital services have optimised aggressively for the moment a user signs up and left almost everything that follows to chance.
A second dimension draws on the work of researcher Richard Heeks, whose concept of adverse digital incorporation describes precisely the condition Pakistan’s low-engagement users inhabit. They have been included in the system. They are not, in any meaningful sense, served by it. They depend on platforms whose terms they cannot understand, whose decisions they cannot question and whose accounts they cannot exit without losing what little they have stored. A subsistence farmer receiving a government transfer into a wallet he has never used, governed by terms he has never read, is not a beneficiary of digital inclusion. He is a passive subject of it. Inclusion without agency is a form of capture, not empowerment.
A third dimension draws on an argument Amartya Sen made about development itself. Growth, he held, should be measured by the freedoms it actually leaves people able to exercise. That framing sits uncomfortably against Pakistan’s current metrics. A country can grow its registered account base year after year and still leave the majority of those account holders no more capable of managing a financial emergency, accessing credit or building savings than before. The connection was made. The capability was not.
Pakistan has already built the scaffolding of a digital economy at a scale that deserves recognition. The question now is what kind of society will stand inside it. If broadband connections, wallets and accounts do not translate into trust, agency and real economic choice, then the achievement will remain incomplete.
The writer is a strategy and communications professional.
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