ISLAMABAD: Pakistan plans to mobilize one million young people as community volunteers to tackle poor literacy, childhood malnutrition and millions of children being out of school, Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal said on Tuesday.
The initiative seeks to tap Pakistan’s unusually young population to confront some of its most persistent human-development problems. Nearly one-third of the country’s estimated 257 million people are aged 10–24, according to the UN Population Fund.
Pakistan also has the world’s second-highest number of out-of-school children, with an estimated 25.1 million children aged 5–16 not attending school, according to UNICEF, while the World Bank says around 40 percent of children under five suffer from stunted growth.
“The real key to our progress lies in the hands of our youth,” Iqbal said at an event in Islamabad, according to a Planning Ministry statement.
The minister said the government was developing a nationwide initiative under which young Pakistanis would work as “social mobilizers” in their communities to promote behavioral change and connect national development priorities with people at the grassroots level.
The volunteers would help efforts to bring children into school, raise awareness about health and nutrition, discourage drug and tobacco use and promote healthier lifestyles, according to the statement. They would also participate in environmental initiatives including plantation drives.
Iqbal said Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was expected to formally launch the program on Nov. 9.
The government did not provide details on how the one million participants would be recruited or trained, whether they would be paid or work as volunteers, how much the initiative would cost or how its impact would be measured.
