Meet Hina: A community leader reaching rural youth with family planning services in Pakistan

"I am a former Youth Designer who worked with YLabs in Pakistan. Personally, now living and working in Canada, when I look back I feel so proud that I had this opportunity to work in the very remote areas of Pakistan. It was a very great experience getting to know women and how they are living in small villages with zero services. I still remember one day we went to a small district health facility and we were talking with the lady health provider and I noticed the burnt black walls. I asked her if they had a fire and she said 'Oh no, that was the delivery from last night. We don’t have electricity in this health facility so if we have an emergency at night time we have to burn candles.' I had never heard of women giving birth in candlelight. Getting to know these kinds of experiences of women and their challenges to accessing health services was really eye-opening for me. That’s what keeps me motivated to work in this field.

The challenge I see is that Pakistan has one of the biggest populations of young people; about 64% of our population is under 30, but the thing is that they don’t have proper guidance. Right now, I am living in Canada and I see young people here have access to so many things. Like with technology, with the lockdown and when schools get closed all the students got laptops or iPads from their schools so they can access their online classes, but nothing like that happened in Pakistan. So young people [in Pakistan] struggled a lot during COVID, they did not have access to computers to attend online classes, they did not have access to the internet, and if they had access to the internet there was no electricity. That is what my siblings, cousins, and neighbors experienced and I saw how hard it was for them. It’s hard for young people because they don’t have support from the government or from society either. I feel like the young people in Pakistan are just on their own in finding their way and doing their best. It really inspires me that they are on their own but still, a lot of them are working so hard to make their lives better or find some opportunities to improve in their fields. They have talent, they have the spark for doing something but at the same time, they have very limited opportunities and resources."

-Hina Shehzadi, Pakistan (Currently in Canada)