Pakistan Is Hiring a Digital Expert FDI for Telecom, But Can One Consultant Reverse the Investment Slide?

Pakistan wants to attract foreign money into telecom at the exact moment foreign money has been walking out of it.

MoITT has created a new position, Digital Expert FDI, SPPS-II, tasked with developing investment opportunities, clearing regulatory and policy bottlenecks, and positioning Pakistan as a competitive destination for international digital capital. The role sits inside the ministry’s push to grow telecom infrastructure investment, emerging technology adoption, and digital services exports, at a moment when the sector’s investment numbers are telling a very different story.

What the Job Covers

The mandate is broad by design. The Digital Expert FDI will prepare export-led investment proposals, project documents, and investment pitchbooks aimed specifically at the telecom sector and will examine incoming investment proposals while developing SOPs meant to make the process easier for investors to navigate. A significant piece of the role touches taxation and budget policy, with the expert expected to contribute to proposals affecting the digital economy and telecom sector while coordinating with the Federal Board of Revenue, Board of Investment, Special Investment Facilitation Council, and PTA to identify and reduce investment barriers.

The position also carries a heavy international mandate, representing MoITT at CPEC, the Economic Cooperation Organization, the Digital Cooperation Organization, CAREC, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation, and supporting negotiation of bilateral MoUs on the digital economy and IT cooperation. The scope extends past traditional telecom into OTT services, IoT, smartphones, fintech, and smart-city initiatives, with a performance target requiring at least one documented policy or regulatory improvement each year that measurably reduces investment barriers. The appointment runs two years, extendable by two more based on performance, under the federal government’s SPPS Policy 2024.

The Numbers This Role Is Walking Into

The backdrop makes the job considerably harder than the terms of reference suggest. According to State Bank of Pakistan data, telecom FDI in Pakistan went sharply negative in H1 FY26: the sector recorded outflows of $431.3 million in the first half of the fiscal year, compared to just $64.8 million over the same period a year earlier, driven largely by Telenor’s exit from the Pakistani market, which triggered a major divestment from Norway.

That collapse was a major contributor to Pakistan’s overall FDI falling 43 percent in H1 FY26 to $808 million, down from $1.425 billion the year before. The wider damage is even starker: total foreign investment into Pakistan, which combines FDI, portfolio investment, and public-private investment, fell to just $207 million in H1 FY26, down from $1.343 billion in the same period last year, according to the same SBP data, an 85 percent collapse.

It isn’t a one-year blip, either. PTA’s own annual report shows telecom-specific FDI sliding for years, from $175 million in 2021-22 to $46 million in 2023-24. A July 2025 Asian Development Bank diagnostic pointed to the structural reasons behind that decline: high taxation, a spectrum auction model priced in US dollars that many operators consider unaffordable, and fiber penetration so limited that only 14.8 percent of cell towers are connected to fiber, arguing these are the core reasons investors have been pulling back rather than pouring in.

Why the Role and the Numbers Are Connected

Read against that backdrop, the Digital Expert FDI position looks less like an opportunistic growth hire and more like damage control formalized into a job description. The ADB’s diagnosis and the terms of reference for this new role overlap closely: taxation reform, regulatory bottlenecks, and Pakistan’s positioning as an investment destination are both the ADB’s stated prescription and this expert’s stated mandate. That’s either a sign the ministry is responding directly to a documented, specific problem or a sign that the problem has been diagnosed for years without the coordinated fix materializing, and this hire is the latest attempt to finally supply it.

The person taking this job inherits work that spans institutions with their own competing priorities: FBR on taxation, PTA on spectrum and licensing, SIFC on facilitation, at a moment when a single high-profile exit like Telenor’s was large enough to swing an entire fiscal year’s telecom investment numbers negative. One documented policy improvement a year, the performance bar the ministry has set, is a modest target against a sector losing capital at this scale.

Why It Matters

Telecom FDI isn’t just a line item on a balance-of-payments report; it funds the fiber rollout, spectrum deployment, and network capacity that everything else in Pakistan’s digital economy depends on, from 5G readiness to the broadband access underpinning fintech, e-commerce, and remote work. When that investment reverses as sharply as SBP’s H1 FY26 data shows, and when total foreign investment across every category drops 85 percent in the same period, the effects compound: slower infrastructure buildout today becomes weaker digital competitiveness years down the line, right as Pakistan is simultaneously trying to position itself as a regional connectivity hub through parallel efforts like the World Bank-backed Digital Economy Enhancement Project.

That’s what makes this hire worth watching past the press release. If the Digital Expert FDI genuinely succeeds in untangling the taxation and regulatory friction the ADB flagged and Telenor’s exit underscored, it could mark the start of reversing a decline that has left telecom-specific FDI running at a fraction of what it was five years ago. If it doesn’t, meaning if the structural problems investors have been citing for years remain unresolved regardless of who holds the pitchbook, this position risks becoming another well-intentioned appointment layered on top of a problem that keeps outrunning the government’s response to it.