Pakistan Digital Authority has appointed Ghaffar Sethar as its Chief Citizen Experience Officer, bringing one of Pakistan’s most experienced human-centered design practitioners into a founding executive role at the institution tasked with building the country’s national digital infrastructure. The appointment places citizen experience at the highest level of Pakistan Digital Authority’s leadership structure, reflecting a deliberate commitment to ensuring that the digital services being built for 240 million Pakistanis are designed around the actual needs, behaviours, and limitations of the people who will use them.
Ghaffar Sethar brings over two decades of professional experience spanning systems design, user experience strategy, and the founding of ventures at the intersection of design, technology, and business. Throughout his career, the consistent thread has been a focus on whether digital products and services genuinely work for the person at the other end of the interaction, a question that has guided his approach across every organisation and project he has been part of. His background encompasses both the strategic and the practical dimensions of user experience work, from deep qualitative research into how people understand and navigate digital systems to the translation of those insights into products that are intuitive, accessible, and trustworthy at scale.
Pakistan Digital Authority framed the appointment in explicitly mission-critical terms, noting that the risk in building Pakistan’s digital future is not that the government will build too little, but that it will build things that citizens do not understand, cannot access, or simply do not trust. This framing identifies citizen experience not as a finishing layer applied after technical development is complete, but as a foundational design requirement that must shape how digital public services are conceived and built from the outset. As Pakistan Digital Authority develops the National Digital Masterplan and rolls out platforms spanning digital identity, data exchange, digital payments, and citizen-facing government services, the Chief Citizen Experience Officer will ensure that the human dimension of those systems receives the same rigour as the technical and policy dimensions.
The appointment of Ghaffar Sethar as Chief Citizen Experience Officer, alongside the previously announced Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Data Officer roles, signals that Pakistan Digital Authority is building a senior leadership team that spans the full spectrum of capabilities needed to deliver credible, high-quality digital public infrastructure, from policy and data governance through to the design of the interactions that ordinary Pakistanis will have with their government in a digital future.
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