It started because someone had to go first.
For over fifteen years, our founder worked alongside neurodivergent individuals — first through research, then through advocacy, and eventually through the everyday work of listening to families who had nowhere else to turn. A dissertation on disability management in UK higher education carried back a simple truth to Pakistan: systems can be built to include people, but only if someone insists on building them.
In Pakistan, that insistence was missing. Neurodivergent adults and children were often diagnosed, then left. Parents were told what their child couldn’t do, rarely what support could look like. There was no shared language for neurodiversity here — no community, no advocacy infrastructure, no bridge between lived experience and the institutions that shape policy.
Corporate training sessions followed, helping HR teams understand what accommodation actually means in practice, not just on paper. Community-based research centered the voices of neurodivergent Pakistanis instead of speaking over them.
That grassroots work eventually connected to something bigger. Being named the UN World Autism Day 2024 Official Representative for Pakistan, and later Country Lead Pakistan for the Institute of Neurodiversity, gave the local work an international platform — proof that this wasn’t a niche concern, but something the world was ready to engage with.
Neurodiversity Pakistan grew out of that same instinct: that advocacy needed a formal home. Not just a hashtag or a support group, but an organization capable of partnering with international donors, engaging the UN, and eventually sustaining itself through an endowment — so this work outlives any one person’s energy or funding cycle.
It started because someone had to go first. It continues because so many people needed it to exist.
Disability Rights Advocate & Mentor
I owe a great deal of my journey to Claudette Jacobs, whose guidance has shaped nearly every stage of my path.
From diagnosis to advocacy to building Neurodiversity Pakistan.
When I was navigating the disorientation of a late diagnosis, she helped me make sense of what it meant — not as a limitation, but as a different way of seeing. When I took my case to tribunal, her legal grounding and lived understanding of disability rights gave me both strategy and steadiness. And as that personal advocacy evolved into something larger, she remained a constant sounding board, pushing me to think bigger while staying rooted in the people this work is meant to serve.
Mentors like Claudette don’t just guide you through a system — they help you imagine one that doesn’t yet exist.
