Pakistan faces real and ongoing threats, from extremism to division. This regularly leads to young people feeling isolated and being shut out from decision making processes. Our partner, Chanan Development Association (CDA), has spent years pushing back against that idea. A national, youth-led organisation, CDA uses interfaith dialogue, sport and cultural exchange to bring young people together across the lines that divide them.

They fund local activists to pursue their own peacebuilding projects and provide opportunities for young people across Pakistan to encounter other religions and ways of life on their own terms. 

Every year, CDA brings this work to life through their National Youth Peace Festival - Pakistan's largest gathering of young people in support of peace. The June 2025 festival was the biggest yet. Getting there took months of careful work, supporting collaboration across a wide network of grassroots groups, informal collectives and civil society organisations.

At the festival, young activists met peers from across the country, sat down face-to-face with policymakers, media professionals and civil society leaders, and they left with new alliances formed - contributing to vital social cohesion within a society that is afflicted by division.

Peacebuilding belongs to the people living closest to the consequences of conflict, and those most invested in what comes after. In Pakistan, those people are young. For CDA, Pakistan's young people are not the problem. They are the answer.