Opinion published in The News International 6 February 2025
Fuzail Khan and Haris Gazdar
Social protection has been defined in official documents in Pakistan as "public initiatives which provide income or consumption transfers to the poor, protect the vulnerable against livelihood risks and volatility and enhance the human capital and rights of the marginalised individuals and communities. “The idea that a society, through state institutions and other forms of public action must protect its members from vulnerability to extreme forms of economic deprivation predates the use of the term social protection. The Constitution of Pakistan provides an anchor for the development of social protection systems. Article 38 (Principles of Policy) requires the state to address the concentration of wealth as well as the guaranteeing of basic necessities, and implies the establishment of what is currently understood to be a modern tax-funded social protection system. The Government of Pakistan has signalled its commitment, through a resolution of the National Assembly in 2016 to Target 1.3 of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, namely to: “Implement nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, including floors, and by 2030 achieve substantial coverage of the poor and the vulnerable”.
The Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) is the main vehicle through which the federal government attempts to redeem this commitment. The core of the programme is its unconditional cash transfer (UCT) known as Benazir Kafaalat which has over 9 million women beneficiaries, who receive a quarterly payout of Rs 13,500 through a modern banking method. Starting with a budget allocation of Rs 35 billion in 2008-2009 BISP has grown into an reputable system for targeting cash transfers to the poor, with an outlay of around Rs 600 billion in the current fiscal year. These impressive scaling achievements notwithstanding, it is important to ask whether and to what extent the Government of Pakistan has redeemed its constitutional obligations and international pledges with respect to social protection.
This article, based on our analysis of publicly available official data, argues that while there are solid foundations to build upon, the task of achieving “substantial coverage of the poor and vulnerable” still lies ahead. Much of the discussion about the performance of the targeted social protection programme in Pakistan has been focused on tackling inclusion errors. Namely, how well do we ensure that social protection benefits are not leaked to those who are not poor. Take a sample of news reporting on the programme. Besides official announcements nearly all of the stories about the programme in the media are about allegations of fraud or about uncovering non-deserving beneficiaries. There is little attention in the policy or public discussion about the programme to addressing errors of exclusion - or ensuring that the poorest are not excluded. When was the last time you read a news report or social media post expressing outrage that a manifestly indigent old woman was not included as a beneficiary.
One way of measuring the coverage of social protection programmes is to estimate the number of beneficiaries as a proportion of the population. BISP Kafaalat beneficiaries are ever married women who are identified on the basis of their household’s poverty score, which is calculated using data on various household characteristics such as housing conditions and ownership of assets. The “universe” from which the target population is selected, therefore, is all ever married women. According to the Population Census of 2023 there were around 50 million ever married women aged 18 or above in the country who were citizens of Pakistan. BISP Kafaalat coverage extended to around 9 million women in that year. So, the programme accounted for around 18 per cent of its “universe”.
But how were these beneficiaries distributed across income classes? We used the Household Income and Expenditure Survey of the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, the most recent round of which was conducted in 2018-2019. This statistically representative sample survey collects data on a range of household characteristics including household composition, consumption expenditure, assets and living conditions, as well as whether or not the household was a BISP beneficiary. We used household consumption expenditure, a commonly used proxy for income, to rank the survey population into five economic classes representing exactly a fifth of the survey population. We then compared the distribution of BISP beneficiaries across these economic classes.
We found that two-thirds of BISP beneficiaries were from the bottom two economic classes, the poorest and the lower middle. The top two economic classes accounted for only 13 per cent of programme beneficiaries, with just 3 per cent coming from the richest class. The BISP targeting system is quite good, compared with social protection systems in other countries, at ensuring that the well-off do not become beneficiaries. So, anecdotes about some well-off people taking unfair advantage of the BISP are just that, anecdotes. They make for a click-bait story, but can be safely set aside if we are interested in evidence-based policy-making.
The situation looks less impressive, however, if we ask what proportion of the population in each economic class is covered by BISP. Overall, around a tenth of the population was covered by the programme in 2018-2019.This is much lower than 18 per cent coverage as measured using programme data (on the number of total beneficiaries) and the Population Census 2023 (the “universe” or the total number of ever-married women in the population). This makes sense because the number of beneficiaries increased significantly - by 55 per cent from 5.78 million to 9 million in the intervening period.
In 2018-2019 BISP covered only 18 per cent of the poorest fifth of the population. If we allow for the increase in programme scale of 55 per cent in the intervening period, and assume that the quality of targeting remained constant, the ratio would only increase to 28 per cent. So, pending data from a new survey it seems fair to conclude that currently BISP under a third of the poorest economic class of Pakistan. In the meanwhile, other countries which began to increase their coverage of social protection, some of them after Pakistan, have achieved over 90 per cent coverage of the poorest.
BISP offers a solid foundation to build upon. Its budget of Rs 600 billion might seem large in absolute numbers but it is still around half the amount the federal government will end up spending on untargeted subsidies. For context, the federal government also spends around Rs 1 trillion on pensions for its own retired employees and their families. It is fair to ask if the constitutional principle that underpins social protection should be taken at least as seriously as the government’s commitment to “its own”. Another path to greater coverage might involve spreading the existing budgetary resource more widely and thinly. Yet another might be through more dynamic targeting - helping people when they need help, rather than seeing existing beneficiaries as semi-permanent fixtures.
The more fundamental shift which is required is for policy-makers, influencers and the people at large to see social protection as a right. Anecdotes about inclusion errors – a person here or there who is well-off and a BISP beneficiary - spark rightful outrage. But the sense of outrage does not extend to stories or statistics of people who needed support and were excluded from it. Perhaps the pioneering organisational work done in setting up BISP raced ahead of the political work that needed to be done to promote the idea of social protection as right. Setting policy goals around coverage and correspondingly increasing the scale of the programme can lead to establishing a new social contract.
Haris Gazdar (haris@researchcollective.org) is a Senior Researcher at the Collective for Social Science Research, and a member of the Board of the Benazir Income Support Programme. Fuzail Khan is a Research Associate with the Punjab Social Protection Authority.The views expressed here are those of the authors and not of any of the organisations with which they are affiliated.
