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hirty years ago, the United Nations adopted the World Programme of Action for Youth marking the first global policy framework to guide national and international action on youth development. Framed as a blueprint for empowering young people, the WPAY placed youth squarely on the global policy agenda for the first time. Its influence has extended across borders, guiding governments, shaping international development priorities and sparking new opportunities for youth inclusion. In Pakistan, too, the WPAY has provided a critical framework, helping to anchor youth
issues within policy debates, institutional reforms and grassroots initiatives.
As the UN commemorates 30 years of the WPAY at its New York headquarters, this is an opportune moment to revisit Pakistan’s youth development journey over these three decades—and to reflect on the road that lies ahead.
The WPAY was adopted by the United Nations in 1995. It was the first global framework dedicated entirely to youth development. Its adoption marked a paradigm shift: for the first time, young people were not framed as a “problem group” needing welfare or control, but as partners in development with the right to participate in shaping their futures. The programme identified ten priority areas at the outset, later expanded to fifteen, covering education, employment, health, girls and young women, leisure, information and technology, participation, globalisation and youth in armed conflict, among others. It promised a holistic approach to youth development that went far beyond service delivery.
Pakistan’s formal youth policy story took shape more slowly. For years, youth-related initiatives were fragmented—sports boards here, training schemes there—without a unifying policy spine. The first National Youth Policy arrived in 2009; the decisive structural shift came in 2010 when the Ministry of Youth Affairs was dissolved and the subject was devolved to the provinces after the 18th Amendment, which triggered a new phase of provincial policy-making.
Over 30 years of the WPAY, Pakistan has seen the development of its youth policies at the provincial and national levels. The Punjab moved the earliest. The Punjab Youth Policy was approved in 2012 and became the province’s anchor document for youth development. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa followed in 2016 with a policy, thanks to the UNFPA and Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung for support, alongside civil-society partners such as Bargad. Sindh approved its policy in 2018 after a long drafting process. Balochistan was the last to arrive at an approved policy, formally launching its Youth Policy in May 2025. The province’s entry, though late, matters: it rounds out a baseline where each unit of the federation has at least a policy reference for the youth, something that simply didn’t exist three decades ago.
These milestones gave Pakistan a basic architecture for youth development: a shared vocabulary, policy anchors in every province and a more routine place for youth consultation in government planning. Implementation has varied and priorities have shifted with political cycles, but the policy scaffolding now exists in a way it did not before. With that architecture in place, a different question comes into focus: which areas across WPAY’s wide canvas have actually drawn sustained attention and resources and which have not?
Separately, at the global level, one reason the WPAY’s footprint often looks narrower than its original canvas is the momentum created by the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. The ICPD placed sexual and reproductive health and rights at the centre of the development agenda, and the UNFPA—mandated on SRHR and adolescents—became a natural driver of youth programming. The WPAY followed a year later and overlapped with ICPD’s people-centred approach, so the best-resourced youth work worldwide clustered around the SRHR: adolescent health, HIV prevention, life-skills education and youth-friendly services.
The emphasis on SRHR was not misplaced—programmes around peer-to-peer outreach, adolescent health education and HIV prevention opened up conversations that had long been taboo. They gave young people access to vital information and created youth-led advocacy platforms such as Y-PEER that still exist today. But it does mean that the policy and programme energy has been uneven across WPAY’s full breadth. Employment and enterprise pathways, quality and relevance in education, everyday civic participation beyond ad hoc consultations, intergenerational initiatives and equitable digital access have not enjoyed the same sustained attention and resourcing as health.
The scale of Pakistan’s youth cohort gives urgency to that imbalance: roughly 64 per cent of the population is under 30, a demographic reality that can be an engine or a drag depending on the breadth of investment. Youth unemployment remains stubbornly high, civic participation is often tokenistic and investments in education and digital infrastructure fall short of the required scale. Provincial youth policies continue to be drafted more as donor deliverables than as political priorities, and while they align with the language of global frameworks like WPAY, their implementation is sporadic and narrow.
As WPAY marks its thirtieth anniversary, there is an opportunity to learn from this history. The past thirty years in Pakistan demonstrate that much focus has been on the sensitive and important area of SRHR, but that other provisions of the WPAY and their holistic linkages have largely been left unpainted. Encouragingly, public and policy circles in Pakistan have also begun to recognise how rapid population growth affects national development. This growing awareness is strengthening the case for investing in SRHR as a foundation for sustainable progress, linking demographic realities with economic and social planning. The next thirty years should be about redressing this imbalance: ensuring that compelling youth issues like entrepreneurship and employment, mental health, climate change, critical thinking and digital empowerment and artificial intelligence receive the same sustained attention and resources as youth health has enjoyed.
For Pakistan, this also means reducing donor dependency and building domestic political will to see youth not just as recipients of programmes, but as partners in shaping national development. Only then can the spirit of the WPAY be fully realised for the country’s largest and most critical demographic group.
The writer, as executive director of Bargad, has pioneered youth policies in Pakistan. She can be reached on Instagram at pherountal.