PUBLISHED
December 14, 2025
KARACHI:
Disability in Pakistan is rarely invisible. It appears in classrooms where ramps are missing, in buses that cannot be boarded, in job interviews that quietly end after a single glance. Yet it is also rarely discussed in any sustained way. For most people, it remains something to be acknowledged briefly, often with sympathy, and then moved past. What is missing from the national conversation is not awareness, but attention to how deeply everyday systems are stacked against persons with disabilities, long before questions of talent or ambition even arise.
Access to schools is uncertain, public transport is unreliable, and expectations are set low from the start. Children are steered towards “special” spaces, not because they lack ability, but because mainstream ones are unwilling to adapt. By the time they reach working age, many persons with disabilities have already navigated years of exclusion. Employment, is often framed as charity, rather than contribution. The loss is not only personal, but economic and collective, and people who could otherwise be shaping classrooms, offices, factories, and businesses across the country, are sidelined.
Disability is not a niche issue. It cuts across class, geography, gender, and profession. It shapes childhoods, limits education pathways, and narrows employment options long before individuals enter the workforce. By the time many persons with disabilities reach working age, their barriers are not because of lack of ability, but because of a system that was never built to accommodate differences.
Against this backdrop, recent conversations around inclusion have, slowly but noticeably, begun to shift from charity to structure and from empathy to systems. For instance, the launch of the second edition of the Overseas Investors Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s (OICCI) Diversity and Inclusion Handbook, developed in partnership with the NOWPDP. The discussions it sparked in the corporate event were deeply human, aimed at confronting gaps instead of drifting off to celebrate progress.
Rather than positioning inclusion as a moral obligation alone, the conversation framed it as a question of redesign. What happens when workplaces are built with accessibility in mind? What changes when hiring processes account for different abilities? And what is lost when millions are excluded from meaningful participation in the economy?
“Corporate Pakistan must move from empathy to structural action,” says OICCI Secretary General M. Abdul Aleem, as he captured the shift. “Persons with disabilities are not looking for favours, they deserve equity, opportunity, and accessible systems. When companies invest in inclusion, productivity rises, retention improves, and workplaces become more innovative.” His remarks moved the discussion away from goodwill and toward accountability. Inclusion, he suggested, is not about compensation, it is about correcting systems that have excluded capable people for decades.
Yet the strongest case for inclusion did not come from policy arguments or business metrics, but from lived experience.
The story of Abdul Qadeer, Co-Founder and COO of Deaf Tawk, reflected the quiet resilience many persons with disabilities develop early in life. “I am the first in my family who suffered from this eye disease, which made my eyesight very poor when I was around 6 or 7 years old,” he says. “My parents were very sad as they didn’t know what happened, as no one had previously suffered from this eye disease.”
There was no treatment available then, and as Qadeer points out, there still isn’t. But the medical diagnosis was only one part of the challenge. “In Pakistan there are a lot of barriers that persons with disabilities have to face and they also have to deal with society’s behaviour towards them. They don’t have good opportunities for education,” he explains.
Despite these obstacles, Qadeer adapted. “When I started my education, there wasn’t much technology for the blind, but I understood how I could take help from technology,” he says.
The learning curve was steep, resources limited, and support systems scarce, yet persistence led to achievement. His success was earned in spite of the system, not because of it. “Alhamdulillah I received a gold medal in my master’s degree,” shares Qadeer, acknowledging the role of innovation. “Technology makes life easy for people with disabilities. A lot of blind people are now getting good education, and many work at a high levels in the corporate sector,”
Farhat Rasheed, Director at Dalda Foods and Westbury Group of Companies, discussed how exclusion often begins long before employment. “I strongly believe that all the differently-abled have some unique qualities,” she says. “Even I had difficulties in getting admission in schools without resources or finance. The mindset in Pakistan is that special children should go to special schools, and no one is ready to see their talent. Segregation is often mistaken for support. All they need is basic necessities, wheelchair access, a little support, guidance and some extra time. If these children are not educated, how will they contribute to society in the future?”
Even academic excellence did not guarantee Rasheed equal opportunity. “I got a gold medal in my degree and was also a high GPA holder, but where my friends had 30 or 40 options to apply, I only had a couple,” she explains. “It was a stark reminder that achievement does not erase bias. For many persons with disabilities, success exists alongside restriction, not freedom.”
The corporate sector, often criticised for its slow response to inclusion, has begun to recognise that exclusion is not just unjust, it is inefficient. Some organisations have moved beyond symbolic gestures and experimented with structured programmes that integrate persons with disabilities into mainstream roles.
Faysal Bank’s Qabil programme is one such example. Habiba Salman, EVP and Head of Learning and DEI, explained that the initiative began before inclusion became a regulatory conversation. “We launched our programme in 2021, with just a pilot group of 10 people in the call centre,” she shares. “What followed challenged long-held assumptions. It was such a huge business case, because in four years, there has not been a single complaint by any customer for those 10 sales officers, who have shown high levels of productivity.”
The results reframed inclusion not as a risk, but as an advantage. “We launched this programme to give them training in the mainstream employment sector so they can get trained and find opportunities — some with us, some outside,” she said while adding that in this model, inclusion was not confined to corporate social responsibility, but embedded into talent development.
“If you want people with disabilities to be part of the workforce, you have to have accessible workplaces,” says Sana Rauf, Talent Acquisition and EVP Manager at Nestlé Pakistan. “We have been having regular audits and from the findings we make sure that we work on the areas of improvement, so all our offices are accessible.”
These interventions point to a broader shift: inclusion is not a one-time initiative, but a continuous process of evaluation and redesign.
Entrepreneurship is also an area where persons with disabilities remain underrepresented. Ali Tareen, Founder and CEO of Khaas Foods Kitchen, outlined the gaps that prevent PWD-led businesses from scaling. “Regarding the challenges of entrepreneurs with disabilities, we need three approaches,” he explains. “First, capacity building of persons with disabilities. We have to equip institutes and people to produce more entrepreneurs. Second, we need to make the system easier for them through reform. We need to move towards financial access or equity-free models. And finally, through visibility. By promoting their success stories of how they can excel and helps organisations gain awareness.”
Inclusion cannot succeed in isolation. It requires alignment across education, finance, infrastructure, and culture.
PepsiCo Pakistan offered a view of what systemic inclusion can look like when embedded across an organisation. “Our focus has been to shift disability inclusion from isolated initiatives into structured and sustainable system design,” explains Sarah Hassan, Senior Director HR. “Through programmes such as Roshan Kal, Beyond Side, and Kaabil, and partnerships with organisations like ConnectHear and NOWPDP, the company has attempted to integrate inclusion into its operational fabric. When inclusion is embedded, the outcome is stronger not just for the individual or the community but for the businesses overall. We are approaching inclusion in a way that is both ambitious and operationally grounded.”
Now if we come back to the OICCI Diversity and Inclusion Handbook, it was clear that the document was responding to a much larger problem than corporate policy alone. The handbook draws on data, case studies, and organisational experience, but its relevance lies in how closely it reflects realities shared. It urges companies to look beyond hiring targets and ask more difficult questions, such as, are workplaces accessible in practice? Are managers trained to support diverse teams? Are career paths designed with flexibility, or with assumptions about what productivity looks like?
What emerged most strongly was that inclusion cannot function as a standalone initiative. It is shaped by the education system that precedes employment, the transport that enables mobility, the technology that makes work possible, and the attitudes that define who is considered capable. When any one of these fails, the burden shifts back onto the individual. And when several fail at once, talent is quietly filtered out, not through policy, but through design.
One side of Pakistan’s reality is defined by barriers that remain firmly in place. On the other side are individuals who continue to adapt, learn, and perform, often with little structural support. Closing that distance will not happen through statements or handbooks alone. It will require a willingness to redesign systems so that access is built in rather than added later. Only then can ability, rather than assumption, begin to shape how opportunity is distributed.
