Azad Jammu & Kashmir (AJK) has witnessed significant unrest throughout June and July 2026. What began as demonstrations over governance and political representation has developed into one of the region's most serious periods of instability in recent years. Clashes between protesters and security forces have resulted in deaths, injuries, communication disruptions, and growing concern from human rights organizations.

As a youth-led humanitarian initiative, Project Sehar believes that understanding the facts is the first step toward meaningful awareness and compassion.

What Triggered the Protests

The protests are being led primarily by the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JKJAAC), a coalition that has raised demands related to governance and political reforms. One of the major issues is opposition to the reservation of 12 seats in the Azad Jammu & Kashmir Legislative Assembly for refugees from Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir living elsewhere in Pakistan. Protesters argue that these seats reduce the political influence of local residents, and have also demanded greater transparency and accountability in governance.

The AJK government and Pakistan's federal authorities have stated that many of the protesters' demands have already been accepted, while maintaining that public order must be protected. Protest leaders dispute that the remaining key concerns have been resolved.

Escalation of Violence

The situation worsened in late July as protests coincided with regional elections. Reports from Reuters indicate that violent clashes resulted in multiple deaths and injuries among both protesters and security personnel. Authorities reported attacks on police and security forces, while protesters and civil society groups alleged excessive use of force against demonstrators. Because the parties involved present different accounts, several organizations have called for independent investigations.

Contested Accounts

Government and protest leaders continue to disagree on which demands remain unresolved — a divide that underlines why independent, transparent investigation matters.

Impact on Daily Life

The unrest has affected ordinary people across parts of Azad Kashmir:

• Schools and businesses have temporarily closed in some areas.
• Public transport and banking services have faced disruptions.
• Internet and mobile communication restrictions have affected families and businesses.
• Hospitals have treated large numbers of injured people, placing additional pressure on healthcare services.
• Daily wage workers and small business owners have experienced financial hardship due to prolonged shutdowns.

Human Rights Concerns

International human rights organizations and independent observers have expressed concern about reports of civilian casualties, restrictions on communication, and allegations of excessive force. They have urged transparent, impartial investigations into the violence and called for the protection of fundamental rights, including peaceful assembly and freedom of expression. Pakistani authorities have rejected some allegations and have stated that security operations are necessary to maintain public order and respond to armed elements involved in the unrest.

Political conflicts often dominate headlines, but the greatest burden is usually carried by ordinary people.

Why This Matters

Families face uncertainty, businesses struggle to survive, children experience disruptions to education, and communities endure fear and instability. Regardless of political opinions, protecting civilians, respecting human rights, and promoting peaceful dialogue remain essential.

Awareness should inspire empathy — not division.

Pakistan is home to one of the largest out-of-school populations in the world. UNICEF's most recent figures put the number at over 25 million children, including roughly 13.4 million girls, and separate estimates from Save the Children put the total closer to 26 million, or 38 per cent of all school-age children, with more girls missing from classrooms than boys nationwide.

The conversation around this crisis often assumes it is a village problem — something happening far from Pakistan's cities. The data, and the lived experience of girls in Karachi, Lahore, and other urban centres, tells a more complicated story.

The Scale of the Crisis

A national household survey conducted between late 2024 and mid-2025 found that 28 per cent of school-age children, roughly 20 million, remain out of school, with rural girls in Sindh and Balochistan facing the steepest exclusion. Separate education statistics from 2022–23 show that 13.71 million girls were out of school that year alone, and that girls are about 7 per cent less likely to attend school than boys — 41.5 per cent of girls remain out of school compared to 34.9 per cent of boys, from primary through higher secondary level.

The gap widens sharply by province. In Balochistan, an estimated 75 to 86 per cent of girls are missing out on education or never reach grade 10. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh, the number of out-of-school girls now exceeds the number of out-of-school boys. Nationally, as many as 70 per cent of girls who start early schooling drop out at some stage before completing secondary school.

Not Just a Village Problem

Some of the most detailed field research on this crisis, including interviews conducted by Human Rights Watch across Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, and Quetta, found the same barriers repeating in dense urban neighbourhoods as in rural districts — child labour, gender discrimination, child marriage, sexual harassment, and a shortage of schools, especially for girls once they reach secondary age.

In cities, government secondary schools and colleges are in far shorter supply than primary schools, creating what researchers describe as an "upward bottleneck": girls who complete primary school in a city like Karachi may simply have nowhere nearby to continue. Families who migrated to urban areas hoping for better opportunities often find themselves choosing between feeding their children and educating their daughters, a trade-off that low-income households face as acutely in city slums as in rural villages.

A study of urban slum communities in Lahore found that women married as children, many between the ages of 11 and 17, were overwhelmingly poor, uneducated, and working as housemaids. Researchers found that some low-income urban families viewed early marriage as a way to protect daughters from harassment or premarital relationships — a decision made possible, in part, because school was no longer seen as a realistic path forward.

The Daily Barriers That Push Girls Out

Rarely does a girl leave school because of one single event. More often, it is an accumulation of daily pressures — the same pressures showing up again and again in interviews with families across the country:

• The commute. A shortage of nearby schools means many girls walk long distances to class, often facing harassment from men on the street, near school gates, or on transport — a daily deterrent that wears families down over time.
• The bottleneck after primary school. Middle and secondary schools for girls are far scarcer than primary schools, in cities and villages alike, so girls who finish primary school often have nowhere within reach to continue.
• The cost of choosing. With education spending at a record low of roughly 0.8 per cent of GDP, many government schools remain under-resourced, pushing low-income families toward costly private options or toward pulling daughters out entirely.
• Child marriage. An estimated 21 per cent of Pakistani girls marry before turning 18, a practice that sharply raises school dropout and is sometimes chosen by families, urban and rural, as a perceived safeguard against harassment or poverty.
• Household and caregiving work. Domestic chores and care for younger siblings fall disproportionately on daughters, especially where mothers also work outside the home.
• Missing female teachers and basic facilities. A shortage of trained female teachers, along with inadequate toilets and washrooms, discourages families from keeping daughters enrolled once they reach adolescence.
• Disruption and insecurity. Climate disasters and instability regularly interrupt schooling — the 2025 monsoon floods alone displaced thousands of families and cut off access to education and health services for children already at risk of dropping out.

Why Progress Has Stalled

Pakistan has historically spent far less on education than the 4 to 6 per cent of GDP recommended internationally. That spending has fallen consistently since 2018, reaching a new low of about 0.8 per cent of GDP in the 2024–25 fiscal year, with education expenditure dropping by nearly 29 per cent between July 2024 and March 2025 alone. Even where school infrastructure has modestly improved, the growth of girls' enrolment has stagnated nationally, raising concern about how sustainable recent gains really are.

A girl who reaches secondary school in Pakistan has already outlasted the barriers that quietly removed her classmates, one by one.

Why This Matters

An uneducated girl today is more likely to be married as a child, to face poor health outcomes for herself and her future children, and to remain outside the paid workforce for life — passing many of the same barriers on to the next generation. Closing this gap is not only a matter of fairness; it is central to Pakistan's broader development, health, and economic future.

Every girl kept out of school isn't a rural statistic or an urban statistic — she is a future being quietly narrowed, everywhere at once.

Pakistan's 2022 National Psychiatric Morbidity Survey found that nearly 38 per cent of the population has experienced some form of psychiatric disorder in their lifetime, with roughly a third currently affected. Among young people specifically, separate research puts the prevalence of mental disorders at close to 29 per cent, alongside a 31.4 per cent rate of suicidal ideation among adolescents and young adults — figures that sit well above what most people in Pakistan would guess if asked. And yet, service use tells the opposite story: young Pakistanis seek professional mental health care far less often than their peers in other parts of the world, despite carrying a heavier burden of illness.

That gap between how many people are struggling and how many actually walk into a clinic is not an accident. It is the predictable result of stigma, scarcity, and a system that was never built with young people in mind.

A System Too Small for the Need

Even a young person who wants help often cannot easily find it. Pakistan has only about 500 practising psychiatrists and roughly 100 clinical psychologists for a population that has crossed 240 million, leaving an estimated 90 per cent of people with a diagnosable mental illness untreated. Some estimates put the ratio as low as 0.19 psychiatrists per 100,000 people, and one commonly cited figure describes a single psychiatrist for every 550,000 patients nationally — a caseload the World Health Organization would consider more than fifty times what is manageable. The professionals who do exist are concentrated almost entirely in major cities: the density of psychiatrists around Pakistan's largest city is more than double the national average, even though roughly six in ten Pakistanis live in rural areas. Mental health also receives only about 0.4 per cent of the national health budget, leaving little room to train new professionals or expand services to where the need is greatest.

Why Silence Feels Safer Than Help

Even where services exist, cultural and religious framing often shapes mental illness as a private shame rather than a treatable health condition. Research on young Pakistani adults describes stigma as one of the most significant psychological barriers to disclosure, rooted deeply enough in cultural and religious belief that many people experience psychological distress as something to hide rather than something to treat. Young people frequently describe being labelled “weak” or “attention-seeking” the moment they try to talk about what they're going through, which teaches an entire generation that silence is safer than honesty.

For young women, the stakes are often even higher. Qualitative interviews with young Pakistani women who had experienced severe mental health problems found that low mental health literacy, internalized stigma, and fear of a damaged reputation repeatedly stood between them and care — concerns that, for many families, extended to worries about how a mental health diagnosis might affect a daughter's marriage prospects. Families are frequently the first and only gatekeepers of whether a young person is allowed to seek help at all, and a family's fear of judgment from relatives and neighbours can outweigh a young person's own wish to be treated.

The Barriers That Compound Each Other

No single barrier keeps young people away from care — it is usually several, stacked on top of one another:

• Cultural and religious framing. Mental illness is often understood through the lens of personal weakness, weak faith, or even supernatural causes, rather than as a medical condition — shaping both whether someone seeks help and who they turn to first.
• Fear of damaged reputation. "Log kya kahenge" — what will people say — remains one of the most cited reasons young people and their families avoid treatment, especially for daughters whose marriage prospects families fear could be affected.
• Low mental health literacy. Many young people and their parents simply don't recognise the symptoms of depression, anxiety, or other conditions as something a doctor can help with.
• Scarcity and distance. With so few professionals concentrated in a handful of cities, many young people in smaller towns and rural areas have no realistic path to a psychiatrist or psychologist, regardless of how they feel about seeking help.
• Cost. Therapy and psychiatric care are rarely covered by insurance and are often unaffordable for lower-income families already stretched thin.
• Lack of youth-friendly, culturally informed services. Where services do exist, few are designed around how young people actually talk about distress, leaving a gap that discourages first-time help-seekers from returning.

Where the Cracks of Light Are

Some shifts are underway. A national Mental Health Task Force was convened to help coordinate the country's response, and a national mental health helpline has been developed to give people a first point of contact without needing to walk into a clinic. Community centres and peer-led programmes are increasingly offering safe spaces for young people to talk without judgment, and digital platforms are giving anonymity to those who would never walk into a psychiatrist's waiting room but might message a counsellor privately. None of this closes a gap this large on its own — but each one chips away at the idea that struggling silently is the only option.

A generation carrying more distress than any before it is still being taught that the safest thing to do with that distress is hide it.

Pakistan has had a legal job quota for people with disabilities since 1981, when a 1 per cent quota was introduced under the Disabled Persons (Employment and Rehabilitation) Ordinance. It was raised to 2 per cent in 1998, and several provinces have since gone further — Sindh and Balochistan now require 5 per cent, and Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa require 3 per cent. On paper, this places Pakistan among a select group of countries with legally mandated disability employment quotas. In practice, a World Bank estimate cited in a 2022 report found that 71 per cent of disabled people in Pakistan are unemployed, and other research puts the employed share of the disabled population at just 14 per cent — nowhere close to what four decades of quota law were meant to achieve.

A Quota That Exists Mostly on Paper

A cross-sectional study of sixteen government departments in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa found that, out of more than 171,000 government employees, only 1,151 — just 0.67 per cent — were people with disabilities. Not a single one of the sixteen departments met the province's own quota. The best-performing department reached 1.65 per cent; several others fell below 0.5 per cent. If government departments, which are directly accountable to quota law, cannot meet it, private employers — who face far weaker enforcement — have even less incentive to comply. The 1981 ordinance does include a penalty: employers who don't meet the quota are meant to pay into a dedicated fund equivalent to the wages they would have paid a disabled employee. In practice, monitoring and enforcement of this provision has remained weak for decades.

Nobody Agrees on the Numbers

Part of what makes this crisis hard to fix is that Pakistan doesn't have a reliable count of how many disabled people it needs to employ in the first place. The 2017 national census recorded disability prevalence at just 0.48 per cent of the population — a figure disability researchers widely consider a severe undercount caused by stigma, narrow official definitions, and underreporting, especially in rural areas. Other estimates range from 6.2 per cent (UNDP) to as high as 14 per cent, in line with global disability prevalence patterns. A Supreme Court ruling in 2020 directed the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics to update its disability data, recognising that a country cannot plan quota enforcement, vocational training, or accessible infrastructure around numbers nobody trusts.

Why the Gap Persists

Interviews with disabled jobseekers and researchers studying school-to-employment transitions point to barriers that operate well before someone ever applies for a job:

• Attitudinal barriers. Disabled Pakistanis are still frequently viewed through a lens of charity or pity rather than capability, discouraging employers from hiring or promoting them on equal terms.
• No accessibility requirements. Pakistan has no dedicated workplace accessibility law, so even employers willing to hire disabled staff often have buildings, transport, and equipment that were never designed to be usable by them.
• Weak enforcement. With little monitoring and only a rarely-collected levy as a penalty, most employers face no real consequence for ignoring the quota entirely.
• Limited vocational training and job-matching. Few structured programmes exist to prepare disabled jobseekers for available roles or to connect them with employers willing to hire, leaving the transition from school to work largely unsupported.
• Compounded barriers for disabled women. Disabled women face what researchers describe as double discrimination — restricted access to both education and employment, on top of the barriers disabled men also face.

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

Excluding disabled people from the workforce is not only a rights issue — it carries a measurable economic cost. Analysis cited by the British Council estimates that marginalising people with disabilities costs Pakistan's economy between 4.9 and 6.3 per cent of GDP annually, or roughly US$11.9 to 15.4 billion, through lost productivity and continued dependency. One estimate put the loss at around US$12 billion in 2014 alone, projected to grow toward US$20 billion by 2018 if nothing changed. These are not abstract figures; they represent millions of working-age adults who are ready to contribute and are instead locked out.

A 2 per cent quota that almost no one meets isn't a policy failure waiting to happen — it's one that's already happened, for over forty years.

Pakistan is one of the youngest countries in the world. According to the government's own Economic Survey 2025–26, more than 66 per cent of the population is under the age of 30, with nearly 67 million people falling in the 15–29 age bracket alone. And yet almost every seat of formal power in the country is reserved, by law, for people well past that age. The Constitution sets the minimum age to sit in the National Assembly at 25, the Senate at 30, the Prime Minister's office at 35, and the presidency at 45. A country that is mostly young is, structurally, run by people who are not.

At Project Sehar, we hear a version of the same sentence constantly, from well-meaning adults and institutions alike: you're not old enough yet. Not old enough to lead a project, sit on a board, be taken seriously in a meeting, or have an opinion on how your own community should be run. We think that sentence deserves to be questioned — not because age carries no wisdom, but because waiting has a cost, and young people are usually the ones who pay it.

A Young Country, Governed Old

This isn't only about parliament. It shows up in small, everyday ways — the teenager with a real fix for a problem in her neighbourhood who's told to bring it up "when she's older," or the student organiser whose ideas are taken more seriously once an adult repeats them. Pakistan's own youth policy debates keep circling back to this same tension. A proposed constitutional amendment discussed in 2026 even floated raising the candidacy age further, a move critics warned would push formal political participation even further out of reach for the very generation the country depends on demographically. The voting age itself was only lowered from 21 to 18 in 2002 — a reminder that the line between "old enough" and "not yet" has always been a policy choice, not a law of nature.

Waiting Isn't Neutral

The usual argument for waiting is caution: young people lack the experience to lead responsibly. But treating youth as something to get through before contributing ignores what's actually being lost in the meantime. Pakistan's labour force participation rate sits at just 46.3 per cent, and youth unemployment and underemployment remain some of the country's most persistent development challenges. Every year that young people are kept on the sidelines of decision-making is a year of ideas, energy, and firsthand insight into problems that never gets used. Communities don't pause their problems until the "right" people are old enough to solve them — the problems keep happening in real time, to people who are living through them right now.

Youth-led organising in Pakistan already proves this. Student federations, women's rights marches, and grassroots climate and education campaigns are consistently driven by people under 30 — not because no one older cares, but because young organisers are closest to the problem and often the first to act on it.

A community's problems don't wait for its members to turn 25. Neither should its solutions.

Youth-Led Doesn't Mean Youth-Only

To be clear, youth-led change isn't about excluding older generations or claiming that age brings no value — mentorship, institutional knowledge, and lived experience matter, and the best organising usually blends all of it. What youth-led actually means is that young people are trusted with real ownership: setting the agenda, leading the project, being the ones in the room making the call, rather than being consulted for optics and then handed a smaller seat at the table. It means credibility is earned through the work itself, not granted only once someone crosses an arbitrary birthday.

Young people don't need to be prepared for the future — they're already living in the present, and it needs them now.

Hunger in Pakistan rarely looks like the famine images the word conjures up. It looks like a toddler who is the "normal" size for a two-year-old but is actually four. It looks like a mother who has enough to keep her family from starving but not enough to keep them properly nourished. Between December 2025 and March 2026, an estimated 7.5 million people across 45 rural districts of Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh were classified in Crisis or worse levels of acute food insecurity — including roughly 1.25 million people in Emergency conditions, one step from catastrophe. Layered underneath that food gap is a nutrition crisis that has outlasted every recent flood, drought and price shock: more than 2.71 million children under five are currently living with acute malnutrition, of whom around 706,000 are severely malnourished and at risk of death.

The Scale of the Crisis

The current wave of food insecurity is being driven by the residual damage of the 2025 monsoon floods, a prolonged drought, and localised insecurity, all of which have weakened farming and herding livelihoods, disrupted markets, and eroded households' ability to cope. Compared with the same season a year earlier, the raw number of people in crisis appears lower, but that reflects a smaller area being surveyed, not an improvement — proportionally, close to a fifth of the analysed population remains in Crisis or worse, essentially unchanged. Nutrition data from the same districts shows the malnutrition situation is now more severe than the food security situation itself, and the latest analysis recorded a 27 per cent increase in acutely malnourished children compared with the previous assessment period. Even where treatment services exist, coverage is thin: in 2025, only around 133,000 wasted children received treatment across Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan — about 27 per cent of those who needed it.

Stunting: A Silent, Long-Term Crisis

Acute hunger makes headlines; chronic undernutrition mostly doesn't, even though it affects far more children. Pakistan's last full National Nutrition Survey, in 2018, found that four in ten children under five — about 12 million children — were stunted, or too short for their age, placing Pakistan among the countries with the highest stunting burden in the world. Wasting, the more acute marker of thinness for height, was recorded at close to 18 per cent nationally that year, above the World Health Organization's own emergency threshold. Stunting isn't simply a symptom of not eating enough; it reflects inadequate nutrition, repeated infections, and poor maternal health compounding during a child's first 1,000 days, and its effects on physical growth and cognitive development are largely irreversible once they set in. Provincial gaps are stark: wasting prevalence has been recorded above 23 per cent in Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's merged districts, compared with under 10 per cent in Gilgit-Baltistan.

The Nutrients Missing From the Plate

Stunting and wasting are the visible endpoints of a much quieter problem: diets that are calorie-sufficient but nutrient-poor. National data shows that more than half of Pakistani children under five are deficient in vitamin A, around 40 per cent are deficient in both zinc and vitamin D, and nearly 62 per cent are anaemic. Only 38 per cent of infants are exclusively breastfed for their first six months, despite breastfeeding being one of the single most protective interventions against early malnutrition. These deficiencies compound each other — a child who is anaemic and vitamin-A deficient is more vulnerable to the infections that then trigger acute weight loss and, over time, stunted growth.

Why This Keeps Happening

• Climate shocks. Repeated flooding, drought, and dry spells keep destroying crops and livestock before households can recover from the last shock, shrinking both food supply and income at the same time.
• Poor dietary diversity. Diets across much of rural Pakistan remain centred on staple grains, with limited regular access to protein, fruit, vegetables and dairy — the foods that supply most micronutrients.
• Weak health service coverage. Community-based treatment for acute malnutrition is not available in many districts, so children who become severely malnourished often go untreated.
• Low breastfeeding and maternal nutrition. Undernourished mothers are more likely to have low-birth-weight infants, and low exclusive breastfeeding rates remove one of the cheapest, most effective protections against early malnutrition.
• Economic pressure. High food and fuel prices push nutrient-dense foods further out of reach for households that are already prioritising staples just to avoid hunger.

Hunger and malnutrition are not the same crisis. A child can have a full stomach and still be missing almost everything their body needs to grow.

What Adequate Nutrition Actually Requires

Addressing this isn't only about getting more calories to families — it's about the right nutrients reaching them at the right stages of life, especially during pregnancy and a child's first two years. The nutrients most consistently missing from diets in food-insecure Pakistani households include:

• Protein. Needed for physical growth and the development of muscle and organ tissue, and chronically under-supplied in staple-heavy diets.
• Iron. Its absence drives the anaemia affecting nearly two-thirds of Pakistani children, undermining energy, immunity, and cognitive development.
• Vitamin A. Essential for immune function and eyesight; deficiency leaves children far more vulnerable to common infections.
• Zinc. Supports growth and immune defence; deficiency is linked directly to stunted growth and slower recovery from illness.
• Vitamin D and calcium. Necessary for healthy bone development, particularly during the rapid growth of early childhood.
• Iodine and folate. Critical during pregnancy and infancy for healthy brain development, with deficiency linked to preventable cognitive impairment.

None of these require exotic or expensive interventions on their own — they require consistent access to eggs, dairy, pulses, leafy vegetables, fortified staples, and, where diets fall short, targeted supplementation for pregnant women and young children. The gap in Pakistan is overwhelmingly one of access and consistency, not knowledge of what's needed.