Grassroots Internships 2026: press kit

LONDON, KARACHI and ARUSHA. A team of young people in Karachi set out to swap their peers’ screen time for offline time. Screen time did not fall, and loneliness rose among those who kept coming. They reported both results, in a programme that gave half its marks for honesty about evidence and consent. They were one of three teams, twelve young people in Pakistan and Tanzania, who presented their findings, including what did not work, at a public online showcase run by Peace Through Prosperity on 23 October 2026. The recordings are public.

Each team spent four weeks, between 28 July and 24 August, running one experiment from the Grassroots Playbook, a free field guide of 17 experiments for teams of three to five. There was no grant and no sponsor. Five reviewers, four of them from outside the programme, scored the work against a published guide. Half the marks went on how honestly a team handled its evidence and its participants’ consent, not on whether the experiment worked.

Scene Makers (Karachi) planned offline sessions on a paid padel court, then moved to free public parks and a home for older people when they saw who would be shut out. Even then, getting there cost participants 300 to 1,850 rupees. Their screen-time results did not move: of eight people who completed both surveys, four reported no change, two an increase and two a decrease. Loneliness scores rose for the three who came back. They reported both.

Beyond Differences (Karachi), five university students, built a dialogue kit on the assumptions people inherit about other communities. They handed it to a former participant to run while they waited outside. When they rechecked their headline result, it shrank, and they reported the smaller number beside it.

Bangata Knowledge Connectors (near Arusha, Tanzania), five secondary-school students working with Savannah Vision Tanzania, mapped what 12 households knew and lacked, then introduced neighbours who had never compared notes. They said plainly that they skipped a baseline because of exams, and that it cost them.

“This isn’t a showcase of success. It is a showcase of evidence,” said Kubair Shirazee, co-founder of Peace Through Prosperity. “The question was never whether twelve young people could change a community in four weeks. It was whether they could run something real and tell the truth about it.”

“It would be very easy for us to stand here and invent a nice reason for why attendance dropped, but our data simply showed who attended, not why they left. We didn’t ask them, so we are not going to guess,” said Rabia Yousuf of Scene Makers.

“The honesty and critical analysis of the outcome and process of the projects are very refreshing,” said Gijs van Selm, a PhD researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who attended the showcase.