 
The Benazir Income Support Program (BISP) is preparing to launch a graduation program for its existing beneficiaries, which will provide additional benefit amount linked with beneficiaries’ co-responsibility of sending their children to primary school. This initiative will go a long way in improving the education outcomes amongst the poorest in Pakistan. Such a program will need a strong federal-provincial as well as public-private partnership to achieve the results.
The poverty scorecard database being developed by the BISP, which has the household level information on more than 25 million households in Pakistan, provides an excellent platform to coordinate and harmonize such pro-poor initiatives of the federal and provincial governments and guide in designing and delivering safety net graduation programs for human development and income generating opportunities for the poor households. This was one of the key outcomes of the learning forum on “Reaching the Poorest: Lessons for and from Graduation” organized recently by the World Bank in Islamabad.
The Forum brought together a dynamic group of representatives from the federal and provincial governments, development practitioners, academia, and development partners to discuss the requirements of a social protection system, which can assist the ultra poor in graduating from short term safety nets in the form of cash transfers to long term opportunities of moving out of perpetual poverty. Speaking at the forum, Mr. Hashemi Syed from the BRAC Institute Bangladesh informed that “in less than two decades, BRAC reached 2.2 million poorest households in Bangladesh, making 75 percent of the households food secure through a variety of graduation programs”. This model has been successfully tested in coastal areas of Sindh province by the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) and has the potential of scaling up by capitalizing on the social protection system that Pakistan is developing. These systems use modern technology for transparent identification of poor households as well as efficient delivery of benefits.
Various speakers at the Forum shared lessons and experiences on how social safety nets could be transformed to graduation programs with the objective of making concrete investments in the development of human capital by improving schooling and primary health of beneficiaries’ children. The PPAF pilot in Sindh has shown that the project interventions have not only helped the beneficiaries in better intake of food, it also achieved a graduation rate of 79% to 88% by increasing their household assets. In addition, some of the households have also started sending their children, between the age of five-ten years, to schools.
The Forum also discussed the strategies for providing faster, transparent, and effective service delivery of social protection programs through unified targeting system, better monitoring and evaluation, and use of technology based management information systems.
|
RSS