How to boost youth employment in Pakistan for the age of AI

In Pakistan, a university degree has become the beginning of a job search, not the end of one. According to Gallup Pakistan's analysis of the Pakistan Labour Force Survey 2024-25, graduate unemployment among young Pakistanis aged 20 -24 stands at 32.8%. Nearly one in three graduates in this age group is unemployed – not because they lack capability, but because the system they graduated into was never designed to absorb them.

Nationally, graduate unemployment at 18.3% exceeds the overall unemployment rate of 14.7% across all education levels. The people who studied hardest are, statistically, the most likely to be left waiting. This is not a talent problem. It is an architecture problem.

Pakistan's computing graduate pipeline is growing at a striking pace. According to the P@SHA Skills Survey 2025, the expected number of CS/IT graduates from HEC-accredited programmes is set to nearly double between 2024 and 2028, from 28,091 to a projected approximate 62,000. More young Pakistanis are pursuing computer science than ever before.

But the industry is not keeping pace. In 2024, P@SHA member firms, which represent Pakistan's most significant technology employers, hired only 13,350 fresh graduates from an estimated pool of 72,952. That is an absorption rate of only 18.3%. For every five graduates entering the market, four do not find work in the sector they trained for.

The gap can be explained by a mismatch of preparation and infrastructure: the connective tissue between education and employment that has never been built. It is not a case of these graduates studying the wrong subject; rather, that they arrive without the mentorship, career signals, or industry exposure that would make them hireable.

Only 7% of Pakistan's youth have access to formal technical and vocational training, against a regional average of 22%. The World Bank estimates that this skills gap costs Pakistan $31.5 billion annually in lost productivity and unrealized export potential. Among youth aged 15 to 29 (nearly a third are NEET, not in education, employment, or training. For young women, that share climbs past half.

The problem is not that young Pakistanis are not working hard enough. It is that the infrastructure needed to connect talent to opportunity – structured mentorship, career guidance, industry networks, honest labour market signals – was never built in most of the country.

The conventional response to youth unemployment is institutional: Build more universities, launch more schemes, create more committees. But institutions move slowly, and the young people who need support are moving through the most consequential years of their lives right now.

The evidence from community-led models is more encouraging. Across 11 African countries, CorpsAfrica recruits and trains young graduates to lead locally defined development projects, embedding them in communities, giving them real ownership, and building the kind of practical competence that formal education rarely provides. The model works not because it is large, but because it is close to the ground.

In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, we adopted our own version of this thinking. Through the Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador programme and the Global Shapers Peshawar Hub, we built a model we call the grassroots multiplier: train someone, and require them to go train others. The aim is not to reach 1,000 people. It is to activate 1,000 people who each reach 10 more. Over four years, this approach has touched more than 1,000 young people across KPK, not through a government programme or a large NGO, but through students and young professionals showing up for each other.

This model – low-cost, community-rooted, multiplier-oriented – is scalable in ways that top-down programmes often are not. And it doesn’t require waiting for institutions to change.

Peer-driven communities work because motivated individuals show up in specific moments. But they lose momentum over time. There is no hand-off. There is no system. The work gets forgotten and there is no follow-up

But that is not infrastructure. Grassroots models prove the demand. They prove that young people will show up when given the right environment, that peer learning compounds when structured well, that communities can move faster than institutions. What they cannot do is replace the architecture that was never built.

We are currently developing a programme that attempts to institutionalize exactly what these informal networks do naturally. This starts not with specific skills, but with clarity – about direction, about what the market actually rewards, and about what paths are genuinely available. Because in a labour market disrupted by AI, knowing which skills are worth building, which opportunities are real, and what AI displacement actually means for someone entering the workforce is equally important. The problem most young people in Pakistan face is not that they lack potential. It is that nobody has ever helped them understand what their potential is for.

According to the World Economic Forum's own research, more than one in three young workers globally are employed in occupations with medium to high exposure to AI-driven task change, and AI threatens to close off the very entry-level pathways that have historically been how young people build skills and access economic mobility. The conversation about AI and the future of work tends to assume that the challenge is reskilling, helping workers adapt to technologies that are disrupting their existing jobs.

But in Pakistan, the disruption arrived before the first-skilling infrastructure ever did. The Global South is home to 80% of the world's workforce, yet the global conversation about AI's impact on work focuses almost entirely on advanced economies.

According to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, structural churn will affect 22% of the current global workforce by 2030. The upskilling infrastructure to manage that transition barely exists in most of the developing world.

Who is accountable for building the human capital architecture in regions where it never existed? The answer is not charity. It is not another scholarship programme that sends 50 people abroad while millions remain without guidance at home. It is intentional, sustained investment in the connective tissue between talent and opportunity: mentorship systems, career infrastructure, honest pathways into work, built at the community level, with community ownership.

As a delegate attending the inaugural Annual Meeting of Global Future Leaders in Dubai this October, I am bringing this question into the room. The leaders gathering there have the networks, the resources and the institutional reach to seed this infrastructure in places that have never had it. The talent is already here. We need to make it count.