In 2019, Waqas Haider delivered the valedictory address at LUMS. As a student at the Lahore, Pakistan university, Haider navigated his economics and management classes, served as president of the Amnesty International chapter, and launched his own nonprofit. 

Haider was the first person in his small village, Basti Dhupsari in southern Punjab, to attend college.

What set Haider on this path was the LUMS National Outreach Program. It’s a comprehensive recruitment and support initiative that LUMS built to help students like Haider overcome geographical, economic, and social barriers to education.

Educational challenges in Pakistan are deep and begin early for many. According to UNICEF, 22 million children in Pakistan aren’t enrolled in school. The country has gaps in literacy and educational attainment along geographic, socioeconomic, and gender lines. Scarce school funding, insufficient facilities, and low educational participation for girls have been persistent challenges.

It’s the fifth most populous country in the world, but only 9% of Pakistan’s population is enrolled in tertiary education, according to UNESCO—compared to 36% in Indonesia, which has a similar population size.

LUMS, a private university of more than 5,000 students established in 1985, set out to address these layers of barriers.

"We wanted to make LUMS a truly national university,” says Nuzhat Kamran, director of advancement. “We were getting extremely talented students, but they were coming from a specific segment of society. We wanted to expand the scope, and reach out to 150-plus cities, towns, and villages across the country to find talented students—students who would never dream of coming to a university.” 

Kamran knew firsthand the value of a college degree: she was a member of LUMS’s inaugural graduating class. After coming on board at LUMS as a staff member in 1999, she led advancement at the institution from the get-go.

She and a founding team of staff members launched the National Outreach Program in 2001. The approach is intensive, and massive in scope: the university dispatches teams of staff across the country to personally visit dozens of schools in remote towns and villages. Staff work with local schools to identify promising students—some of whose families make less than US$300 per month, says Kamran—and invite students to Lahore for two weeks of coaching to take an entrance exam and extra training in basic science.