This country has millions of young people but rarely do they feel seen. Their lived reality remains bleak: employment is hard to attain, transactional and precarious, education is outdated and mental health, when mentioned at all, is treated as a luxury. The institutions meant to nourish them, schools, media, even family, have become places of performance. Meanwhile, government initiatives often reduce the young to economic units: future employees, entrepreneurs or digital influencers, rather than acknowledging them as complex individuals with inner lives.
To address this problem, we need policies that go beyond vocational training and startup grants. We need structural inclusion of young voices in political discourse, mental health to be integrated into national health strategy and to stop treating young people as problems to fix or investments to monetise.
Zainab Misbah
Karachi