About GEN in Pakistan

GEN began working in Pakistan in 2008 when it launched Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) in partnership with Youth Engagement Services (YES). The first campaign focused on catalyzing Pakistan’s entrepreneurial community through activities aimed at young entrepreneurs at technical institutions. This resulted in scores of new projects, with hundreds of participants receiving coaching, training, and mentoring. The momentum from this initial success led to a growing annual campaign that mobilized and coalesced the ecosystem, seeding new support for Pakistani founders. As a consensus steadily formed in Pakistan around the wide-ranging benefits of entrepreneurship, GEN laid the groundwork for more than a decade and a half of ecosystem building across the country.

In 2011, GEN partnered with Alternate Solutions, an Islamabad-based organization led by Kashif Khan, to build the campaign into a national movement. Each successive year drew in steadily higher-profile champions and greater government attention. GEN found a strong supporter in Ahsan Iqbal, Pakistan's Minister for Planning and Development, who championed entrepreneurship as a vehicle for national and economic development. By 2015, GEW had become a venue for high-level policy discussion, resulting in UNIDO’s Investment and Technology Promotion Office in Bahrain introducing an entrepreneurship-development and investment-promotion program in the country. The campaign also built ties with the Islamic Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture, and the International Network for SMEs.

GEN's partnerships reached across the country to include chambers of commerce, incubators, and universities such as Iqra University and the University of Karachi. Each conducted their own GEW activities, including workshops, exhibitions, and competitions. In 2019, GEN established a Startup Huddle chapter in Lahore, hosted by Innovation District 92, to support founders by building community through regularly scheduled, structured sessions. With GEN now operating on a year-round basis and the campaign requiring greater national coordination, GEN established a registered affiliate, GEN Pakistan, in 2022 to carry the work forward throughout the year.

GEN Pakistan promotes entrepreneurship and works to align the country's stakeholders around building the ecosystem. Drawing on the relationships built over the years, GEN introduced two programs aimed at building business skills with the support of the Higher Education Commission. The programs place young people in internships spanning government, non-profit, and private organizations. By 2025, GEN Pakistan had secured strategic partnerships with the Arfa Karim Foundation, Ejad Labs (an innovation platform), the Higher Education Commission, the Punjab Small Industries Corporation, and Ashreitech, a technology-training firm led by Sohail Zindani.

GEN’s recent GEW campaigns have sharpened their focus on inclusion through a widening set of university and corporate partners. Its work with Ejad Labs paired startups with industry-specific training, while its partnership with the Punjab Small Industries Corporation opened the door to policy dialogues, awareness campaigns, and incubation programs for founders in Punjab. A defining thread of these efforts has been reaching entrepreneurs outside the largest cities and supporting women in business. Through the Arfa Karim Foundation, GEN Pakistan promotes entrepreneurship among people in rural areas via skills-building seminars, which form part of the foundation's plan to establish rural entrepreneurship centers nationwide. GEN Pakistan has also worked with the Hamari Uraan initiative on programming aimed at female leadership.

A consistent feature of GEN's work in Pakistan is government engagement. GEN has tied its national campaign to the country's development priorities, and Pakistan’s government has participated in GEN's global gatherings. Pakistan was represented at GEC Riyadh 2022 by officials from the Prime Minister's Office, including Zulqarnain Abbas, an adviser to the Prime Minister for E-Commerce, and Muhammad Saqib Ibrahim, the principal staff officer. GEN's partnership with the Punjab Small Industries Corporation, a provincial government body, deepened its public-sector engagement, and GEN is now a partner of the Senate of Pakistan.

GEN supports Pakistani founders through its global programs. In addition to its Startup Huddle chapter in Lahore, it added chapters in Islamabad and Karachi. GEN also offers mentor match and investor match programs that connect founders with experienced entrepreneurs and sources of capital. Furthermore, the Entrepreneurship World Cup (EWC)—the global pitch competition GEN launched in 2019—provides Pakistani founders with training and mentoring while they compete for US$1 million in prizes. Pakistani startups have repeatedly reached the Global Top 100. Among them are Tez Financial Services, a Karachi digital-microfinance company founded by Naureen Hyat, and mimAR, an augmented-reality venture from Islamabad founded by Muhammad Naqi Ejaz. Later cohorts added GGDEN, founded by Farrukh Sarfraz, along with the health-focused startups Mobiliti and Wonder Women.

GEN maintains relationships with a broad range of Pakistani institutions, including the Prime Minister's Office, the Senate of Pakistan, the Higher Education Commission, the Punjab Small Industries Corporation, the Arfa Karim Foundation, Ashreitech, and Ejad Labs. It also partners with universities and business schools such as Iqra University, Superior University, and the Institute of Business Management (IoBM). To extend its reach beyond Islamabad, Karachi, and Lahore, GEN has worked with National Incubation Center campuses in Hyderabad and Peshawar, which hosted GEW programming and pitch competitions for founders in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh.

Pakistan's GEW campaign ranks among the top 10 worldwide for creativity, scale, and the engagement of prominent brands and public figures. Reflecting on that standing, Kashif Khan said, “GEN's work in Pakistan is opening doors for Pakistan's leading organizations to gain global recognition and access to new markets.”

As GEN widens its reach in Pakistan, its programming is looking outward. One of GEN’s leaders in Pakistan, Sheikh Safeer ul Haq, founder and chief executive of Indus Office Automation, has represented Pakistani founders in international forums and was named to the CXO Global 100 for 2026. Meanwhile, GEN has pursued partnerships with organizations in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates aimed at opening new markets for Pakistani startups. With the Global Entrepreneurship Congress heading to Doha, Qatar in 2027, GEN’s goals in Pakistan remain exactly what they have been since its first campaign: connecting the country's founders with the knowledge, networks, capital, and policy support they need to scale.