Growing and Climbing in Pakistan’s Mountain Communities With Zom Connection

This summer, I received support from INSEAD’s Hoffman Institute for Social Impact to complete an internship with the non-profit Zom Connection, facilitating projects to help grow outdoor sports in communities in Pakistan’s northern mountain regions. 

Pakistan is a destination for extreme skiers, mountaineers, and adventure travellers who seek out some of the world’s tallest and most rugged mountains. However, local participation in mountain sports is minimal, even in places with the ideal terrain.

Zom Connection (with “Zom” meaning “mountain” in the Chitrali language) was founded in Chamonix in 2019 by Julien “Pica” Herry, a French mountain guide and professional snowboarder, to bridge this gap. Their work involves delivering equipment, creating resources, and fostering talent and know-how in places where such sports could flourish. 

Having been involved with them, I was keen to use my MBA summer for a project that could add to their momentum—I reached out to Pica and friends in the Pakistani climbing scene who have been active with Zom’s previous initiatives.

We settled on two projects: the first was building a new climbing wall in Chitral District (a city of 50,000 people at the foot of the Hindu Kush range), and the other was holding a youth competition at their existing climbing wall in Hunza (delivering a lot of extra gear to both places).

I arrived in Pakistan in late July, and over the next month, a small team of us worked to procure materials, facilitate logistics, conduct outreach, and eventually travel to those areas to execute the projects. This was a non-traditional internship in the field, involving 18-hour car rides through treacherous roads, picking out logs at the local lumber mill for construction, and a fair bit of manual labour. There were many challenges, mainly around logistics and getting stakeholder buy-in, but it was ultimately a worthwhile effort.

With a small amount of resources, we were able to mobilise many individuals and create a lasting impact. It was particularly heartening to see that both projects generated a lot of buzz and organic interest among adults and youth alike.

We had the chance to forge genuine connections through climbing and make contributions to communities that are sometimes overlooked. It’s exciting to consider that projects like this could accelerate a new trend in these places, perhaps spurring a new economy around climbing-based tourism or producing athletic talent much more advanced than what currently exists. These small initiatives are just a first step, and hopefully, they will catalyse interest among locals.

Projects like this also evoke a lot of thought about the trajectories of remote cities in a developing country such as Pakistan. Pakistan’s political and macroeconomic context in recent years has been fraught, with the rupee losing more than half of its value relative to the dollar since 2018 and devastating climate change-driven flooding in 2022. 

Despite the need for broader structural investment and reforms across the country, communities like Hunza and Chitral are relative bright spots for regional development. There is great hope that such projects can expand the realm of possibility for these communities and areas beyond.

This internship experience was supported by the INSEAD Hoffmann Institute Impact Internship Stipend and gifts from alumni.