Pakistan’s accountancy classrooms produced a remarkable run of world beating results at the start of this decade, as Pakistani students top ACCA exams in session after session. Between September 2020 and December 2021, nine students based in Pakistan were named global prizewinners by ACCA, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, after scoring the highest marks in the world in individual exam papers. The run covered everything from foundation level bookkeeping to the final Strategic Business Reporting paper, and it placed Lahore, Karachi, Faisalabad and Peshawar on the same results sheet.
A global prizewinner is a precise honour, not a vague compliment. ACCA awards a cash prize to the candidate who achieves the highest mark worldwide in an individual Applied Skills or Strategic Professional exam, on a first attempt, in a single session, and it awards medals to the affiliates who record the highest total average marks across the Strategic Professional level. It publishes no rankings beyond the prizewinners themselves, and it crowns no overall champion across papers. Its students sit the same papers, to the same standard, around the world, and at the time of this run ACCA counted more than 527,000 students worldwide. To finish first in a paper is to finish ahead of every other candidate on the planet who sat that paper in that session.
A qualification built in London and sat in 180 countries
ACCA was founded in London in 1904, with the stated aim of widening access to the accountancy profession. It has grown into the body it now describes as the only truly global professional accountancy body. ACCA currently reports 257,900 members and 530,100 students and affiliates in 180 countries, supported by more than 8,100 approved employers. The qualification itself is a ladder. Students start with foundation and Applied Knowledge papers, climb through Applied Skills subjects such as Financial Reporting and Audit and Assurance, and finish at the Strategic Professional level, where Strategic Business Reporting is a core paper and Advanced Taxation is one of the options. Session based exams run four times a year, in March, June, September and December, which means every paper produces a fresh worldwide field, and a fresh global prize, four times a year.
Pakistani students top ACCA exams: the record, session by session
The run began in September 2020. Muhammad Abdullah, a BSc Accounting and Finance student on the ACCA embedded programme at the Suleman Dawood School of Business at LUMS in Lahore, scored the highest marks in the world in Strategic Business Reporting, one of the final level papers of the qualification. LUMS announced that ACCA had declared him the global prizewinner for the paper, and his dean, Dr Alnoor Bhimani, called the achievement top class and world leading.
Three months later came the result that made national headlines. Zara Naeem Dar, an ACCA student at the SKANS School of Accountancy in Lahore, scored the highest marks in the world in the Financial Reporting exam in the December 2020 session, with a reported score of 96 percent. ACCA Pakistan announced her as its global prizewinner in February 2021, and the Government of Pakistan congratulated her publicly. She credited her father, a retired military officer who had encouraged all the girls in the family to aim high, and rejected the old assumption that finance and accountancy is a male dominated profession.
Dar’s path since then shows what a global prize can start. She went on to complete the qualification and become an ACCA affiliate, then built a career in technology consulting with EY before moving into a project management role in Dubai, alongside speaking engagements that have included TEDx events in Pakistan.
March 2021: three global prizewinners in a single session
The March 2021 session produced something rarer still: three Pakistani global prizewinners in one sitting. When ACCA announced the results, Kahaf Moid of Karachi had scored the highest marks in the world in Audit and Assurance, Ali Shan, also of Karachi, had taken the global prize in Financial Reporting, and Fakiha Maqsood of Faisalabad had scored the highest marks in the world in Advanced Taxation. Reports at the time put Maqsood’s Advanced Taxation score at 99 percent, and she also recorded the highest marks by any student in Pakistan in Strategic Business Reporting in the same session. Their sitting remains the clearest single proof that Pakistani students top ACCA exams in depth, and not through one star name alone.
Maqsood, whose father is also a professional accountant, had earlier been a national position holder in Financial Management and had topped Punjab in her A levels before studying accounting and finance at City, University of London. She said she wanted to use her qualification to help modernise the textile sector in Faisalabad. Moid, a former science student who had won a full A level scholarship at her Karachi college, spoke of representing Pakistan at international forums. Two of the three toppers were young women, all at the start of their careers.
December 2021: four Foundation level toppers
The run closed at foundation level, in the papers taken by beginners, and the pattern held one last time. When ACCA announced the December 2021 results on 18 January 2022, four more Pakistani students had scored the highest marks globally in their papers. Muhammad Umair Jan of Peshawar topped Recording Financial Transactions, Arham Ali of Lahore topped Maintaining Financial Records, Usama Maharir Muhammad of Lahore topped Managing Costs and Finance, and Komal Bawani of Karachi achieved a perfect score in her Foundation level paper.
Assad Hameed Khan, then head of ACCA Pakistan, said it was encouraging to see the country’s youth putting in the hard work to outperform their peers around the world, and that the results helped establish Pakistan as a global hub for world class talent in accounting and finance. These are the entry papers of the ACCA pathway, sat by beginners in every market, which makes four global firsts from three Pakistani cities all the more striking.
The classrooms behind the results
None of this happened in a vacuum. ACCA says it has had a presence in Pakistan since 1997, working through a network of Approved Learning Partners, the tuition providers it quality checks to teach its syllabus. ACCA Pakistan’s head office is in Lahore, and ACCA lists further offices in Islamabad, Karachi, Multan and Faisalabad, the same spread of cities the prizewinners themselves came from.
The nine winners came through that infrastructure, by different routes. Dar studied at the SKANS School of Accountancy in Lahore. Abdullah took the university route, through the ACCA embedded programme inside his LUMS business degree. The March 2021 three came from Karachi and Faisalabad tuition, and the December 2021 four from Peshawar, Lahore and Karachi. Different cities, different classrooms, one examination standard: that breadth is a large part of why the run reads as a system producing excellence, rather than a single prodigy carrying a country.
Why this run still matters
Precision matters here. These results do not mean Pakistan won an overall world championship, because ACCA does not award one, and later ACCA lists of Pakistani place winners are national placings rather than world titles. What the record does show is depth. Across four separate sessions, in papers ranging from the first steps of bookkeeping to advanced taxation and strategic reporting, the single highest score in the world kept coming from a Pakistani classroom. That is why teachers still cite the period when they explain how Pakistani students top ACCA exams at every level of the qualification.
The ACCA run also sits within a wider pattern of Pakistani students succeeding on world stages. This site has covered Quaid-i-Azam University breaking into the QS world top 400, Pakistani students winning second prize at the Belt and Road Business Challenge in China and 28 Pakistanis named in The Muslim 500 2026. Each story is different, but together they describe a generation that is competing globally and winning on merit.
For students now preparing for their own sittings, the nine names from 2020 and 2021 remain the benchmark: Abdullah, Dar, Moid, Maqsood, Shan, Jan, Ali, Muhammad and Bawani. They did not top a class, a college or a city. They topped the world in their papers, and they did it from Pakistan.
Sources
- ACCA: how global prizewinners are decided
- ACCA: why choose ACCA (257,900 members and 530,100 students and affiliates in 180 countries)
- ACCA: a well rounded qualification (presence in Pakistan since 1997, Approved Learning Partners)
- ACCA: global offices (Pakistan offices in Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, Multan and Faisalabad)
- LUMS: SDSB student scores highest marks in ACCA Strategic Business Reporting examination
- MediaSpring: Pakistani girl makes the country proud by shining bright in ACCA exams (Zara Naeem, December 2020)
- Zara Naeem Dar: LinkedIn profile (ACCA affiliate, EY technology consulting, project management in Dubai)
- The Reporters: Pride of Pakistan, three global prizewinners (March 2021)
- Academia Magazine: Pakistan takes the lead with 4 students topping ACCA exams worldwide (December 2021)
- ACCA Pakistan: place winners directory
- Featured photo: Metropolitan International United College (MIUC), students and delegates at the ACCA Pakistan Leadership Conversation ceremony in Islamabad, via MIUC
Umar is an engineer by profession and a passionate writer by passion. He has a deep interest in sharing good news related to Pakistan and has been working hard to promote the positive image of his homeland. Umar has written numerous articles on various topics related to Pakistan, such as technology, sports, culture, and economy.