Founder and CEO of Youth Engagement Services (YES) Network Pakistan/PNYS.
Ashoka Fellow in Pakistan.

Ali is from Lahore, Pakistan, where he earned his BA and Masters in Political Science focusing on Development Politics. He also holds a one-year diploma in documentary making from GNN in Montreal and has completed one-year master program in community organizing and development in McGill University, in addition, to his participation in short training courses in Johns Hopkins University, USA. He is the Founder and Director of Youth Engagement Services (YES) Network Pakistan/PNYS. He has a lifelong devotion to empower every young person in Pakistan, to make significant contributions to their own lives and to revitalize their communities. His driving forces “Action without vision is pointless, vision without action is fruitless combined, and it could lead to great things.” His checklist for change includes “developing the confidence, skills and clear action” to empower youth and achieve results. He has developed modules and materials to mobilize young people of his country to constructive action and has set up many small youth groups throughout Pakistan for collective and self-help actions.

He is the CEO and President of YES Network Pakistan. He is implementing his projects in underprivileged rural areas all over the country. He has provided inspiration and vision to large number of young people across country. He has a wide experience of working with youth, which is filled with change and challenge; visioning; planning and program development; innovative and social action initiatives and much cooperative exciting work both within and outside the country. He has extensive experience in conceptualizing, designing and successfully implementing youth development programs. He is a very effective trainer and has conducted over 100 capacity building workshops in the filed of leadership development, gender, communication, participatory learning for action, values, reproductive health, team building, community mobilization, community organizing, etc for all segments of population in partnership with local, national and international organizations.

He has played a pioneer role in designing and implementing first-ever youth service and sexual reproductive health programs for under-served and at-risk youth. He is taking a very innovative, pro-active and integrative approach to youth involvement as a way to meet the high service needs of the society and to head-off violence and crime from the society. He is very instrumental in reaching out to heard-to-reach and socially excluded young girls and women living in an under resourced and victimizing environments. His strategies have contributed immensely in creating local women champions and leaders in many of the low-income communities. He with his team of youth service volunteers has established over 150 female multi-functional learning centers in various parts of Pakistan, including border areas where there is hardly any opportunity and infrastructure for the promotion and protection of human rights of women and girl children. These centers have already provided a wide range of services to over 6000 young girls and women. He is continuously seeking for new opportunities and tools to empower disadvantaged girl children and women. Currently, he is using video documentaries to highlight the miseries, injustice and inequality being faced by countless girl children and women in Pakistan.

He is committed to innovation and consistently seeks to pioneer new and cost-effective strategies, models and implementation methods that result in solution based youth movements. He believes that creative ideas are needed to resolve problem that continue to plague young people. His model of working with youth is gaining increasing support internationally as a vibrant alternative for at-risk and disadvantaged youth. He has won numerous awards worldwide. Ali is the first male youth from Pakistan who is conferred upon the status of “Sauve Scholar” by the Jeanne Sauve Foundation in Canada. He has also conferred upon the first youth service award by Jawan Pakistan. He is bestowed upon with Government Color and University Blue award. He is frequently invited by leading education institutions in the world for talks on youth. He is also invited by the UN to participate in their High Level Dialogue on youth in Geneva in 2005. He is selected as a fellow by the international leadership program in California for the year 2005-6. He has the honor of meeting with the outstanding leaders of the world. Recently, he had the pleasure of meeting with the former US President Bill Clinton in Washington, DC. He is elected as an Ashoka fellow from Pakistan in year 2006. He is also recently selected as an “Architect of the Future” by Waldzell institute in Austria. His referees call him “an inspirational young leader who is constantly in motion and is infecting others with enthusiasm, optimism and can-do attitude.”

He has traveled widely and participated in many international programs ad activities. His vision is “Youth as the solution, not as the problem.” As a student, he was named Captain of Government College Lahore Cricket team and best player of the University of Punjab. Ali speaks Urdu, English, Punjabi and Hindi.