“One-sixth of the world children, adolescents and youth were out-of-school in 2018 and astonishingly about 35% of them were from South Asia. In 2017, 44% of children aged 5-16 in Pakistan were not enrolled in school. Due to low or continuous reduction in government spending on education, accessing to higher education is even a dream to Pakistani population. Only 4% of people get higher education in Pakistan which is much lower than in India and China – 11% and 20% respectively.

Poverty and financial constraints are the core hindrance in the way of growth in higher education. In order to reduce poverty and control income distribution, the development of higher education could be a considerable policy option. For that end, the governments of Pakistan (both at federal and provisional level) have taken several initiatives towards students’ participation in HEIs by providing them scholarships.

This rigorous short to medium term impact evaluation will be carried out to assess the impact of three different type of scholarship programs (HEC-Ehsaas scholarship, HEC-Need scholarships and BEEF scholarship) on students’ academic performance in the public sector universities of Balochistan. In this quasi-experimental research design, a mixed methods strategy will be used to analyze the impact evaluation. The proposed estimation techniques for each scholarship program are difference-in-differences (DID), Regression Discontinuity (RD), statistical matching analysis (e.g. PSM), and multivariate regression.

Evidence derived from this impact evaluation would help policymakers and scholarship monitoring bodies to understand the success and failure for implementation of the programs. It would also provide the guidance and direction for initiating similar scholarships or for rolling-out these and other such scholarships throughout the country.”