KARACHI, Sept 15: Karachi Commissioner Shoaib Siddiqui said on Sunday that youths of Lyari could deliver good results in all fields if healthy educational and recreational activities were provided to them.

He was speaking at the inauguration of a five-day residential camp, the Lyari Young Leaders Conference. The event was jointly organised by two non-governmental organisations — the School of Leadership (SoL) and Karachi Youth Initiative — under their youth leadership development programme at a suburban resort. Over 300 youth from Lyari aged between 18 and 24 years participated.

The commissioner urged other NGOs working on youth issues to come forward and organise such programmes for the youth of Lyari, which was one of the oldest localities of the metropolis and had produced many a sportsmen, particularly footballers, boxers, etc.

He regretted that for the past some time some parts of Lyari had been in the grip of lawlessness owing to which the area youths could not participate in sports or cultural activities.

He hoped that the conference would stretch the physical and mental capacities of the participants using an experiential approach coupled with mentoring and coaching sessions.

He said that 25 speakers from across the country would be engaged in a meaningful debate with the participants.

Umair Jaliawala of SoL hoped that the conference would be a learning process for the participants and they would benefit from it and would take this knowledge to their respective communities.

He said that the conference would polish the hidden skills of the participants and would give them a way to lead their communities to a new way of life.

Another speaker, Farhan Iqbal, said that the young people of Lyari were extremely talented and had capacity to improve their lives and to bring about an improvement in their homes and community.

He thanked the community leaders, parents, school heads, NGOs, etc, for showing trust and extending cooperation, without which the conference could not have materialised.