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A few years ago, the United Nations adopted the Global Program of Action for Youth, the first global policy framework to guide national and international action on youth development. Designed as a blueprint for youth empowerment, WPay put youth on the global policy agenda for the first time. Its influence has spanned borders, guided governments, shaped international development priorities and created new opportunities to engage young people. In Pakistan, too, WPE has provided an important framework, helping to anchor youth issues in policy debates, institutional reforms and grassroots initiatives.
As the United Nations commemorates 30 years of WPA at its New York headquarters, it is an opportune moment to reflect on the road and reflect on the developmental journey of Pakistan’s youth over these three decades.
WPay was adopted by the United Nations in 1995. It was the first global framework dedicated entirely to youth development. An example shift in its adoption is identified: for the first time, youth were not in need of welfare or control as a “problem group”, but as partners in development with the right to participate in shaping their future. The program initially identified ten priority areas, later expanded to fifteen, covering education, employment, health, girls and young women, leisure, information and technology, participation, globalization and youth in armed conflict. It promises a holistic approach to youth development that goes far beyond service delivery.
The story of Pakistan’s formal youth policy took shape more slowly. For years, youth-related initiatives were fragmented—training schemes here, training schemes there, without a coherent policy backbone. The first National Youth Policy came in 2009. A decisive structural change took place in 2010 when the Ministry of Youth Affairs was disbanded and the subject transferred to the provinces after the 18th Amendment, triggering a new phase of provincial policy-making.
Over 30 years of WPAY, Pakistan has seen the development of its youth policies at the provincial and national levels. Punjab initially moved. The Punjab Youth Policy was approved in 2012 and became the province’s anchor document for youth development. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa followed with a policy in 2016, thanks to UNFPA and Heinrich Bell Stuffing, along with civil society partners such as Bargad. After a lengthy drafting process, Sindh approved its policy in 2018. Balochistan was the last to arrive at an approved policy, officially launching its youth policy in May 2025. The entry of the province, albeit late, matters: there is a baseline where each unit of the federation has at least one policy reference for youth, which did not exist a few decades ago.
These milestones gave Pakistan a basic architecture for youth development: common vocabulary, policy anchors in each province and a more regular place for consulting youth in government planning. Implementation is different and priorities have changed with political cycles, but the policy incentives are there now like never before. With this architecture in place, a different question comes into focus: Which areas of WPAY’s vast canvas have actually generated sustained attention and resources and which have not?
Also, at the global level, WPE maps are often narrower than its original canvas, a momentum created by the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. The ICPD has placed sexual and reproductive health and rights at the center of the development agenda, and UNFPA – SRHR and Adolescents. WPay followed a year later and overlapped with the ICPD’s people-centred approach, so the best housing youth around the world work clustered around SRHR: adolescent health, HIV prevention, life skills education and youth-friendly services.
The emphasis on SRHR was not misplaced. They gave young people access to important information and created youth-led advocacy platforms such as Y-PEER that still exist today. But this means that policy and program energy across the breadth of WPAY has been uneven. Pathways to employment and enterprise, quality and relevance in education, day-to-day civic participation beyond ad hoc consultations, intergenerational initiatives and equal digital access have not enjoyed the same consistent attention and resourcing as health.
The contribution of Pakistan’s youth gives this imbalance an immediate urgency: about 64 percent of the population is under 30, a demographic fact that can be an engine or a drag depending on the scale of investment. Youth unemployment is stubbornly high, civic participation is often tokenistic and investment in education and digital infrastructure falls short. Provincial youth policies are being drafted more as donor deliverables than political priorities, and while they align with the language of global frameworks like WPay, their implementation is atypical and narrow.
As WPay celebrates its sixty-third anniversary, there is an opportunity to learn from that history. In Pakistan over the past thirty years, it appears that much attention has been focused on the sensitive and important area of SRHR, but WPA and other provisions of their comprehensive linkages have been left largely unpainted. Encouragingly, public and policy circles in Pakistan have also begun to recognize how rapid population growth affects national development. This growing awareness is strengthening the case for investing in SRHR as a foundation for sustainable development, linking demographic realities to economic and social planning. The next thirty years should be about redressing this imbalance: ensuring that compelling issues such as youth 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 programs, but as partners in shaping national development. Only then can the spirit of WPAY be fully realized for the nation’s largest and most vulnerable demographic group.
The author, as Executive Director of Banyan, presents youth policies in Pakistan. She can be reached on Instagram at @Peurontal.
