When the Government of Pakistan and its international partners needed organisations capable of leading sensitive, high-stakes fieldwork for the country's most significant HIV surveillance exercise to date, they did not turn to just anyone.
Pakistan Lions Youth Council was one of them — and the only one given responsibility for an entire province's field operations, leading data collection across all ten participating districts of Sindh in Round 6 of the Integrated Biological and Behavioural Surveillance (IBBS) study.
It is a recognition nearly forty years in the making.
Founded in 1986 and formally registered in 1993, PLYC has spent decades building exactly the kind of reputation that this moment required: deep roots in the communities it serves, a disciplined and experienced field workforce, and an unbroken record of delivering where it matters most — from tuberculosis screening and Lady Health Worker support under national and Global Fund-backed programmes, to disaster relief for flood-affected families, to youth empowerment and education initiatives that recognitions like the National Youth Award (2008), the Human Rights Award (2013), and the Tuberculosis Programme Award (2023) have honoured along the way.
That legacy is precisely why, when the Ministry of National Health Services, Regulations and Coordination and the National AIDS Control Programme moved to conduct the most comprehensive HIV surveillance study Pakistan has ever undertaken, PLYC stood among the handful of organisations judged capable of carrying it out. Commissioned through UNDP with funding from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and implemented by a technical consortium led by the Health Services Academy, the study spanned 31 districts and engaged more than 31,000 participants nationwide. PLYC was entrusted to lead the entirety of Sindh's field operations — recruiting, training, deploying, and supervising the teams responsible for reaching some of the province's most marginalised and hardest-to-engage communities, under rigorous national ethical protocols and the approval of Pakistan's National Bioethics Board.
This was not administrative work. It was frontline responsibility for one of the most sensitive undertakings in Pakistani public health — engaging with people who inject drugs, transgender individuals, men who have sex with men, female sex workers, and people in prisons, with the professionalism, discretion, and dignity that this work demands. That PLYC's teams were the ones asked to do this, across an entire province, speaks to a level of trust that is not easily won.
The evidence PLYC helped gather will now shape how Pakistan protects its most vulnerable citizens for years to come — informing national HIV policy, resource allocation, and the country's next phase of Global Fund-supported programmes.
From a single cow at Usama Dairies Farm to a seat among top-tier organisations trusted to safeguard a national health study — PLYC's story has always been one of communities placing their trust in an organisation that never stopped showing up. This is the latest chapter, and among the proudest.
PLYC thanks the Ministry of National Health Services, Regulations and Coordination, the National AIDS Control Programme, UNDP, the Global Fund, and the IBBS Round 6 consortium for this trust — and above all, the communities of Sindh who made this work possible.
To learn more about PLYC's nearly four decades of impact across health, education, climate resilience, and community development, explore the rest of this site.
Districts covered nationwide in the study.
Participants engaged across Pakistan.
Districts of Sindh, all led in the field by PLYC.
Province-wide field mandate entrusted to a single organisation — PLYC.