Amal Academy

The challenge

Pakistan’s education system struggles to prepare graduates for the modern workforce.  Focused on rote memorization, it often overlooks crucial job skills and soft skills development. Highly educated graduates, especially from public universities, struggle for employment due to the lack of practical skills. This scarcity of skilled candidates amplifies unemployment rates and financial instability, pushing over 80% of individuals to work in the informal sector. Instability and frustration contributes to graduates moving to other countries, underemployment, and in the most intense cases, recruitment by extremist groups, exacerbating societal challenges.

The innovation

Amal Academy is one of the first professional soft-skills vocational training academies in Pakistan. Launched as an after school NGO program, Amal leverages the infrastructure of partners and low-income high schools integrating soft skill content (communication, problem solving, critical thinking, team work, etiquette, professionalism) into existing curriculum. The course is a three-month (100 hour) program that incorporates videos over mobile to introduce ideas, peer-to-peer learning to ensure understanding, and activity-based learning to increase retention.