Hassam Ali

Hassam Ali, is a second-year Master in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID) candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he studies as a Joint Japan–World Bank Graduate Scholar, a highly competitive fellowship awarded to a small cohort of students worldwide committed to careers in international development.  He is the founder of GBIST (Gilgit-Baltistan Institute of Science and Technology), a technical training institute he built to address chronic youth unemployment and critical workforce shortages in one of Pakistan’s most remote and underserved regions. 

Since 2020, GBIST has trained over 3,000 individuals in skills-based technical education, with healthcare as one of its core domains, transforming the institute into one of the most impactful workforce development models in northern Pakistan. Hassam launched and scaled GBIST while simultaneously serving as an Assistant Director at the State Bank of Pakistan, the country’s central bank, where he worked on banking regulation and financial market oversight. Balancing both roles shaped his conviction that lasting development requires institutions built to scale and endure, even in geographically isolated markets that traditional development interventions often overlook. 

Hassam holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), where he began developing the analytical foundation that would later inform his work in central banking and institution-building. At Harvard, Hassam is deepening his expertise at the intersection of finance and development, applying rigorous analytical training to the challenge of designing institutions that can convert capital and skills into durable, community-owned economic opportunity. As a SICI Fellow, Hassam is working to scale GBIST’s skills-based technical education model, expanding its financing capacity and exploring how the model can be adapted to other underserved regions facing similar gaps in employment and workforce readiness.