Let Us Build Pakistan #LUBP

In some tehsils across Pakistan, more than 8 in 10 girls aged 5–16 have never set foot in a classroom. Not dropped out, they were never enrolled. I wrote about what the census found, and why the gap follows girls straight into the workforce and out of STEM. @LetsBuildPK @ISBScienceFest @Campaignistan thenews.pk/print/1439967-the…

Four generations already lived through this. A fifth is being set up right now, not by an enemy, but by our own inability to stay consistent on anything: who's a friend, who's a threat, or whether a plan we already wrote gets implemented at all. That's not a security problem. That's a discipline problem. @salarzai_ on @LetsBuildPK

A genuinely productive evening, hosted by the Royal Danish Embassy and Novo Nordisk, on a health crisis Pakistan doesn't talk about enough: obesity, its medical burden, and the policy partnerships needed to actually address it. Grateful to @ridaqz for the invitation, and to Ambassador @DKInPK for the hospitality. In the room: Senator @AnushaRehman, Senator @SenatorMumtaz, former caretaker Health Minister, Dr. Shabana Haider from the Population Planning Commission, and the Novo Nordisk and Danish Embassy teams. One number worth sitting with: nearly 40% of people with obesity say they don't feel comfortable raising it with their own doctor unless the doctor brings it up first. That's not a medical gap. That's a stigma gap, and it costs real lives. Novo Nordisk supplies roughly half of Pakistan's insulin and serves close to a million patients here. Their "Live Lighter" message is simple: you don't have to manage this alone, and medical options exist. Conversations like this are exactly why partnerships between health innovators and policymakers matter. Looking forward to exploring more around the topic with sustained deliberations and action.

This is the part of the conversation that shouldn’t stay inside a studio. A woman taking home twenty-two to twenty-five thousand rupees can’t clear an electricity bill. Dr. Musadik Malik asks the only follow-up that makes the rightsizing brief real: if the state won’t reduce itself, what exactly is it asking the public to give up? @DrMusadikMalik said it on LUBP, as convener of the rightsizing sub-committee, and the clip only matters if the committee treats that woman as the brief rather than as a talking point.

A federal minister, describing his own government from the inside: “You spin like a dog chasing its own tail. Full power sits with you. The file still stalls it.” Then he describes watching Saudi Arabia move at a completely different speed, under a culture that says: what’s the worst that happens, we’ll fix it. Same minister, same skillset, two systems that treat authority completely differently. I wish we didn’t just listen to people like @DrMusadikMalik, but actually executed what they put on paper.

Gilgit-Baltistan represents #Pakistan @ForeignOfficePk 🇵🇰💚