Pakistan has more young people than at any point in its history. Roughly two-thirds of the country’s population is under thirty. By most demographic counts, that is either an enormous opportunity or an enormous problem, depending almost entirely on what happens in the next decade.
Syed Sadat Hussain Shah has spent considerable time thinking about which way that calculation tips. His answer, worked out through years of civic engagement and programme development, is that it depends on whether young people get the chance to practise leadership before the moment demands it of them. Not read about it. Not watch videos about it. Actually practise it, with real stakes and real feedback.
That conviction sits at the centre of YES Pakistan, the youth empowerment platform he helped build into one of the more substantive civic leadership initiatives in the country. The organisation is not large by corporate standards. It does not have the funding of an international NGO or the visibility of a government programme. What it has is a clear theory of change and the organisational discipline to follow it.
| Two-thirds of Pakistan’s population is under thirty. Whether that becomes an opportunity or a problem depends on what happens in the next decade. |
What YES Pakistan actually does
Youth empowerment is a phrase that covers a lot of ground, not all of it useful. At one end, it describes organisations that run motivational seminars and hand out certificates. At the other, it describes programmes that genuinely change how young people think about themselves in relation to their communities and their country.
YES Pakistan aims for the second category. The organisation runs structured training in leadership and communication skills, civic responsibility, and practical civic engagement. The target is young people between roughly sixteen and twenty-eight who have the interest and the capacity to contribute to their communities but have not yet found a framework for doing so.
The programme design reflects a fairly straightforward observation: most Pakistani youth development work focuses on economic skills, and rightly so, given the employment pressures the country faces. But economic skills and civic skills are not the same thing, and a functioning society requires both. A young person who can get a job but has no sense of how institutions work, how to navigate public systems, or how to organise collective action around a shared problem is not fully prepared. YES Pakistan works in the gap.
Syed Sadat Hussain Shah: the organiser’s approach
People who work with Syed Sadat Hussain Shah tend to describe his approach in similar terms: methodical, direct, with a preference for outcome over optics. He is not a figure who fills a room with inspirational rhetoric and then disappears. The work he does is closer to the unglamorous end of development work, which is probably why it produces results that last beyond the workshop closing ceremony.
His background in civic and governance work gave him a perspective that is somewhat unusual in Pakistan’s youth development space. He is less interested in what young people feel empowered to do in the abstract and more interested in whether they can actually do specific things: facilitate a community discussion, write a proposal, engage with a local government office, analyse a policy and explain its implications to a neighbour. These are not soft skills in the conventional dismissive sense. They are the technical capabilities of civic life, and most young Pakistanis have had no formal opportunity to develop them.
That analysis shapes the YES Pakistan curriculum and also shapes how Syed Sadat Hussain Shah himself engages with participants. He is direct about what the programme can and cannot offer. He does not promise jobs or connections, though both sometimes follow. He promises that participants will come out of the programme with a clearer sense of their own civic role and more practical ability to act on it. That is a specific and honest commitment, and it is one the organisation can measure.
| He is less interested in what young people feel empowered to do in the abstract. He wants to know whether they can actually do specific things — facilitate a meeting, write a proposal, explain a policy to a neighbour. |
What changes for participants
The changes that YES Pakistan’s training produces are not always the ones that show up neatly in a before-and-after comparison. Some are straightforward: participants leave with better public speaking, better writing, better ability to organise a meeting and keep it on track. Those skills are visible and trainable and the programme works on them systematically.
But the harder-to-measure shifts may matter more in the long run. Young people who go through a programme that takes civic engagement seriously, that treats them as future contributors to public life rather than problems to be managed, tend to carry that experience forward. They join community organisations. They apply for positions in local government. They set up their own small initiatives. They mentor younger peers, sometimes within the YES Pakistan structure and sometimes independently.
One pattern worth noting: YES Pakistan’s participants are drawn from different regions, educational backgrounds, and income levels. That mix is deliberate. Syed Sadat Hussain Shah’s view, shared by many in civic education work globally, is that leadership training done in socioeconomic silos produces leaders who do not know how to work across differences. Pakistan’s civic culture suffers, among other things, from a lack of people with the confidence and the skills to bridge those gaps. YES Pakistan tries, in a small but consistent way, to produce some.
The training and what it looks like in practice
YES Pakistan runs its core training in cohorts. A group of participants moves through a structured curriculum over several weeks, with workshops, facilitated discussions, assignments, and a final community project component. The cohort model is deliberate: it creates a peer group that persists beyond the formal programme, which is often where the most durable value accumulates.
The workshops cover ground that Pakistani schools and universities largely do not. Students learn to read and interpret a government document. They practise chairing a meeting where people disagree. They analyse how a local community problem might be addressed through formal channels versus informal organising, and discuss the trade-offs. They write position papers and present them to their peers, who push back.
The community project component is perhaps the most instructive. Participants identify a real issue in their local area, develop a response plan, and take initial steps toward implementing it. Most of these projects are small. Some of them fail to get very far. Both outcomes are treated as learning experiences, because both are realistic outcomes of civic action in Pakistan, and preparing young people for the reality of institutional friction is part of what civic education should do.
For participants from smaller cities and rural areas, who make up a significant portion of YES Pakistan’s cohorts, the programme often provides a first encounter with structured civic training of any kind. The gap between what urban and non-urban young Pakistanis have access to in terms of skills development is wide, and YES Pakistan’s regional reach is one of the aspects of the programme that Shah has pushed to expand.
| The community project component treats failure as a learning outcome, because institutional friction is the reality of civic action in Pakistan, and preparing young people for that reality is part of what the programme is for. |
The longer arc: what this kind of work builds toward
Pakistan’s civic institutions have structural problems that no youth programme can fix on its own. Weak local governance, limited civic participation, a general distrust of public processes — these are real conditions that young people trained by YES Pakistan will encounter and will need to navigate rather than transcend.
But there is a reasonably well-evidenced argument in the international development literature that civic education at scale, done well, changes the culture of participation over time. It does this not by producing heroes but by producing a larger number of people who know how institutions work, who are not easily intimidated by bureaucratic processes, and who have some practical experience of collective action. Those people, distributed across a society, make the civic culture somewhat more functional than it would otherwise be.
YES Pakistan is not large enough yet to claim that kind of population-level impact. What it can claim is that its alumni are disproportionately likely to be the people in their communities who show up at the local council meeting, who know which government office handles a particular complaint, who can explain to their neighbours how a specific policy works and what they can do about it. In a context where civic literacy is genuinely scarce, that is not a modest contribution.
The difficulty of this work, and why it continues
Civic education in Pakistan faces a set of structural headwinds that are worth naming plainly. Funding is inconsistent and often tied to international development cycles that do not match the slow, long-term nature of culture change. The political environment creates uncertainty about what kinds of civic engagement training can be conducted without attracting the wrong kind of attention. And the economic pressure on young people is severe enough that a programme offering skills rather than income has a real recruitment challenge, even when the skills it offers are genuinely valuable.
YES Pakistan has had to be realistic about all of this. The organisation is not funded at the scale its ambitions would justify. Its reach is limited by that funding gap, and by the practical difficulty of delivering quality training at distance in a country with uneven digital infrastructure. Shah has spoken about the gap between the number of young Pakistanis who would benefit from what YES Pakistan offers and the number the organisation can currently reach. That gap is one of the things that drives the push to expand.
The argument for continuing, in the face of these constraints, is not that the problem is solvable quickly. It is that the alternative, which is to leave a generation of young Pakistanis without structured civic preparation during one of the most consequential decades in the country’s demographic history, is much worse than the imperfect progress of incremental work.
What comes after the workshop
The young person who completes a YES Pakistan programme and goes home to a small city in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or southern Punjab does not return to a transformed environment. The institutions are the same. The economic pressures are the same. The social expectations are largely the same.
What is different is the young person. They know more about how local government works. They have practised arguing for a position under pressure. They have facilitated a group discussion and watched it go sideways and figured out how to recover it. They have met peers from other parts of the country who are navigating the same frustrations through slightly different local conditions, and they know those peers are out there. That is not nothing. In a country that will increasingly depend on whether its young population can convert its numbers into civic capacity, it is a start.
Syed Sadat Hussain Shah would probably describe it in more modest terms. But the work speaks for itself: a programme that keeps running, keeps filling cohorts, and keeps producing alumni who show up when showing up is needed. In civic development, that is about as good as a proof of concept gets.