Daily Times

The population, relatively young, serves as the fuel for incumbents to steer in directions guaranteeing national success. Gen Z also referred to as ‘the digital natives’, consisting of 63 per cent of the demography, remains in a gridlock with no way out in sight.

Ours has never been a country lending a helping hand to its demography in times of hardship. The same is the case with youth. Ironically, the youth of the country finds itself between the cogs of illiteracy and unskillfulness. Cognitively potential though, the tool to materialise the potential is pervasively missing, ergo, obsolescence prevails.

Though the youth or Gen Z, is born in a technologically advanced and changing world, the country hasn’t been able to provide the tools so much as to utilise and extract the output. As the world is changing more towards digitalization, the economy is in proximity with technology – Fintech is an example – and the political footing is already revolutionized with technological tools like digital media – which helps political parties to communicate, campaign, and engage – our priorities are so far misplaced.

Successive incumbents showcased a denial citing thousands of individuals doing freelancing on various digital platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, and Amazon. However, this, in no context, is a satisfactory counterargument since a handful of individuals’ skillfulness cannot deny the fact that ‘millions’ are suffering under the heel of poverty, prejudice and disenfranchisement.

Pakistani freelancers are deemed as novices and inexperienced and become notoriously famous for not meeting deadlines, and providing low-quality and plagiarised material.

Consider this alarming situation: Pakistani freelancers are deemed as novices and inexperienced and become notoriously famous for not meeting deadlines, and providing low-quality and plagiarised material. This has resulted in no trust in Pakistani freelancers. What made this possible was the bombardment of profile creation with fake identities and edited documentation. Though most of the account holders have started to lose their accounts due to their inability to prove identity, some escaped individuals perform poorly owing to their Pakistani nationality. What made this happen involves the government’s role as well since the various status quo failed to facilitate the freelancers in skills building and providing convenience payment procedures. This is one of the examples of how much Pakistan’s youth are back in the race.

While other countries’ asset – youth – is having boons in every walk of life like tech-entrepreneurship, and skills development in this digital era, Pakistan struggles to educate its people, strives to create social safety nets, and is unable to incentivize a milieu for youth for their skills upsurge. Factually, the country has put a ‘toothless’ fish to compete with mighty sharks.

Moreover, millions graduate from universities every year with no soft skills to maintain an image on global platforms, hundreds of thousands of graduates are unable to write a piece of writing with clarity or coherence and almost all – with a few thousand exceptions – lack communication skills along with digital literacy.

Pakistan never intended to sow the seeds of literacy, rarely prioritised to incentivize youth, and once in a while emphasised the importance of digital literacy as well as social empowerment. This leaves this youth in a desert of delusion and an ocean of helplessness.

To have clarity in the context, the youth lacks an economic enculturation which is a cornerstone to build oneself financially stable which is directly proportional to the national economy. Gen Z is never exposed to political empowerment to harness the skills of leading, decision-making and critical thinking. The asset of the country is obsolete since no successive governments initiated a national platform to learn, understand and undertake any soft skills.

Worse, the rural youth is discarded discriminated against and considered untouchables for no reason whatsoever. Inaccessibility to the quality education structure, inadequate access to internet connection and other facilities are causes of rural youth laggardness. The fool’s paradise that the youth is facilitated with every means necessary for their growth and development in terms of their urban counterpart persists. Digging deeper leads to the fact that discriminatory treatment creates an unbalanced circumstance. That, in effect, triggers an eventual harm.

For seven and a half decades, the youth has unfortunately been under the heel of disenfranchisement and unskillfulness, faced a lower hand against their counterparts, and suffered societal disarray due to state dysfunctionality in silence.

Contrary to a Herculean task though, the unwillingness coupled with inconsistency and incompetency of the state institutions portray this task as equivalent to Brobdingnagian. While reality lies otherwise.

What Pakistani institutions are required to provide a level playing field is to incentivize broad-based initiatives by needs, trends and demands. To extract the outcome of the potential Gen Z possesses is possible via educating quality material, promoting digital literacy, enhancing IT scope and incentivizing tech-entrepreneur pursuits.

Since change is a process, the sooner the initiatives are incentivized, the greater success will be within arm’s length distance given the boom the IT sector along with other technological specifications has created within a short time. To alter the prism of seven decades from black-and-white to coloured, backing Gen Z is the key.

Though the fruits of transformations surface in generations, today is the very day the metamorphosis is triggered to have fruits in the next generation. Contrary to this, a national failure, God forbid, awaits.

The writer is a freelancer. He can be reached @insafalibangwar98@gmail.com