The Higher Education Commission (HEC) and the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to integrate electoral education into university curricula and promote voter awareness among youth nationwide. The signing ceremony was chaired by the Acting Chief Election Commissioner and attended by senior leadership from both organisations, with the MoU signed by Prof Dr Zia Ul Haq, Executive Director of HEC, and ECP Secretary Omar Hamid Khan. The partnership adds to a series of similar agreements ECP has pursued with academic institutions in recent months, including an earlier MoU with the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics focused on electoral research and civic engagement, and a separate agreement with Fatima Jinnah Women University aimed at boosting young women’s electoral participation.
The partnership focuses on integrating electoral education into undergraduate university programmes, launching joint Youth Ambassador initiatives to encourage civic engagement, and organising awareness sessions and campaigns across higher education institutions nationwide. HEC will facilitate coordination across universities, while ECP will provide the necessary resources and support to build out electoral education and voter awareness content, giving the partnership a division of responsibilities that mirrors how ECP has structured its other recent university-facing MoUs. Bringing HEC into this kind of agreement gives ECP a channel to standardize electoral education content across Pakistan’s broader university system rather than working with individual institutions on a case-by-case basis.
The initiative builds on ECP’s established track record of running student awareness workshops nationwide, having conducted more than 2,274 such workshops between November 2021 and November 2024 targeting higher secondary schools, colleges, and universities. These earlier workshops have been credited with contributing to a rise in youth voter turnout from 37 percent in the 2018 general elections to a record 48 percent in the 2024 general elections, giving ECP a data point it has repeatedly cited when expanding its youth-focused civic engagement programmes. Embedding electoral education directly into undergraduate curricula, rather than relying solely on standalone awareness sessions, represents a more structural approach to sustaining that upward trend in youth participation over the longer term.
Described as a three-year, extendable partnership, the agreement aims to build youth knowledge of the electoral process and encourage active participation in the country’s democratic process. The MoU’s Youth Ambassador component in particular extends a model ECP has used in other recent partnerships, where student representatives act as intermediaries between the Commission and their peers on campus, helping translate broader civic education goals into localized outreach. Whether this latest agreement between HEC and ECP produces a more systematic, curriculum-embedded approach to electoral education compared to earlier standalone MoUs will likely become clearer as universities begin rolling out the specific undergraduate programme integrations and awareness campaigns envisioned under the three-year partnership.
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