By Eshal Amin and Hana Marfani

In most Model United Nations rooms in Pakistan, a delegate raises a placard, the chair nods, and a speech begins. It is so ordinary that no one notices how much it assumes: that every delegate can see the placard, hear the chair, read the draft resolution, and follow the debate as it moves.

For blind and deaf children, each of those assumptions is a locked door. We started Voice for All to unlock them.

When we began working with students at Ida Rieu School, we were not experts in special education. We were two students who loved debate and could not understand why children with so much to say were never invited into the room where things get said.

So we started small: one-on-one sessions, then small groups, learning as much from our students as they learned from us. Over time that added up to more than 90 hours of coaching, and 45 children trained in MUN.

What we saw in those hours changed us. A deaf student who had rarely been asked for her opinion began drafting arguments with a precision that would put many seasoned delegates to shame. Blind students memorised country positions, built clauses in their heads and delivered them without a single note.

The talent had always been there. The access had not.

Then came the hardest part: getting them to a real conference. Taking a delegation of blind and deaf students to LUMUN, one of the country’s most prominent MUNs, meant interpreters, accessible materials, travel and accommodation. We raised Rs. 1.15 million to make it happen, knocking on doors and explaining, again and again, why this mattered.

It mattered. Our students did not just attend LUMUN. They won the entire deaf committee.

That was not the end of it. Across five conferences, our delegates have now won 21 awards. Every one of those awards was earned on equal terms, against students who had never had to fight for a seat at the table.

But we knew that a few good years with a few good coaches would not be enough. Programs that depend on individuals fade when those individuals leave.

So we turned everything we had learned into a structured curriculum designed specifically to help blind and deaf students take part in MUN: how to research without sight, how to debate without sound, how to make a committee room work for everyone in it.

That curriculum has now been endorsed by two schools, Ida Rieu School and RLPS, which means it will keep reaching children long after we have graduated.

The deeper problem, though, was never just MUN. A blind or deaf child in Pakistan faces closed doors long before a debate competition, and long after it. Too many schools lack Braille materials and trained teachers. Too many graduates leave school with no clear path to work.

Talent that should become doctors, lawyers, teachers and policymakers ends up unseen.

So we did what our students had been practising all along: we wrote policy. Our paper set out how blind and deaf children can be supported through school, through education built around Braille and accessible learning, and into employment.

On October 9, 2026, a resolution drawing on that work was presented in the Balochistan Assembly, with our efforts formally recognised. The resolution will be printed in the official records of the assembly.

A resolution is not the finish line. It is a promise, and promises only matter when they are kept. We hope, and we will keep pushing, for the government to turn that resolution into Braille textbooks in classrooms, sign language support in schools, trained teachers, and real pathways into jobs.

We are asking for more than that, too. We are asking every school, every MUN organiser and every employer reading this to look at their own rooms and ask who is missing from them.

Accessibility is not charity. It is the difference between a country that uses all of its talent and one that wastes it.

Our students taught us this better than any textbook could. They were never voiceless. For far too long, the rest of us simply were not listening. It is time we started.