Maryam Nawaz Sharif brings Punjab’s urban vision to the global stage in Baku

Qudrat Ullah At the World Urban Forum in Baku this week, Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif presented a comprehensive and data-driven vision of urban transformation, highlighting Punjab’s evolving development model and placing the province prominently within the global conversation on sustainable cities, climate resilience and people-centred governance. The occasion was the World Urban Forum — one of the United Nations’ principal platforms for debating the future of cities, housing, climate resilience and inclusive governance. Heads of government, urban planners, development economists and senior diplomats from across the globe were in attendance. It was not a stage built for provincial politicians. Yet the Chief Minister of Pakistan’s most populous province used it to mount a case that Punjab, for all its well-documented challenges, is attempting something genuinely worth examining. Her address combined development reportage with a clear philosophical framing. Resilient cities, she argued, can only be built when governance is human-centred, environmentally conscious and driven by data rather than political instinct. “My responsibility is towards the woman who walks miles for water, the child breathing polluted air and the homeless family without shelter,” she told delegates. It is a formulation that travels well across borders, because the problems it describes are not unique to Punjab. They are the defining challenges of rapidly urbanising societies from Sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia. The centrepiece of her presentation was Punjab’s flagship housing initiative, “Apni Chhat Apna Ghar,” which she described as one of the world’s largest interest-free housing programmes. More than 160,000 families have received housing support in under a year, with over 100,000 completing construction and taking possession of their homes. In a country where affordable housing has long been a policy aspiration rather than a policy reality, those figures — if independently verifi