by Azmat Budhani
|
The appointment of the energetic Marvi Memon as Chairperson has signalled a welcome revival of interest in the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) at the highest levels of government. BISP was partly an upshot of the slogan “Benazir aaygee rozgar laaygee” (Benazir is coming, she will bring employment) in the election manifesto of Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP). The cash transfer programme was introduced in 2008 when the PPP and Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) were in coalition, to help families cope with a sharp hike in food prices. It later became a flagship social protection programme and was enacted into law with unanimous cross-party support in both houses of parliament.
It was the first programme of its type in Pakistan which directly
provided cash (1,000 rupees monthly) to women in poor households. This was
innovative enough. But the BISP
also changed things in Pakistan with respect to the design of social programmes. We at the Collective had ring-side seats to
both observe and at times influence programme design and processes, having been
part of several
studies and evaluations
of the programme.
In the beginning, from 2008 to around 2011, the federal government
relied on parliamentarians to programme beneficiaries. Each parliamentarian was given several
thousand application forms to distribute to the poor in their constituencies
and completed applications were then verified by the National Database
Registration Authority (NADRA) before a woman was enrolled as a
beneficiary. This came to be known as
Phase 1 of the programme. Problems with
this way of doing things were acknowledged from the start. Besides obvious dangers of political
favouritism in beneficiary identification, there were practical issues. According to Member of National Assembly
(MNA) Dr Nafisa Shah: “MNAs have no office set up and staff to locate poor
women so we have to rely on our political activists at various levels to reach
poor households. We don’t even have the
secretarial facilities necessary to process so many forms.”
In the meanwhile, BISP was already working, with help from the World
Bank and other donors, on testing a poverty scorecard (PSC )
survey in 12 pilot districts. This survey was at the base of the new design
for the programme. It could be broken
down into several processes including implementation of the survey, data management,
beneficiary selection, payment disbursement, enrolment grievances, and
payment-related complaints, to name but some.
Each of these processes had further sub-processes. It was our job, along with our partners in
the Process Evaluation, to carry out independent observations of each of these
processes and particularly the interaction between programme processes and
intended beneficiaries. Teams of
enumerators fanned out across the country with their forms and satchels and
others shadowed them around with their clipboards and pens to observe if
prescribed processes were being followed. Many
of the recommendations made during the course of the Process Evaluation were
eventually incorporated into programme design to improve its access and
outreach to intended beneficiaries. One
example was the use of the door-to-door census method to implement the PSC and to add extra steps in the census method to
ensure the inclusion of socially marginalized women and their families.
The immediate aim of the PSC was to provide simple data on all
households in the country and to compute a poverty score for each surveyed
household to determine whether or not its women members could become programme
beneficiaries. Once the lessons from the
pilot districts were incorporated the PSC was rolled out to the entire country. This herculean task was then followed up with
the setting up of grievance and complaints systems for dealing with beneficiary problems. The programme’s online presence helped as it
allowed ordinary citizens to check their poverty scores on an official website
to know if they were indeed eligible.
The market economy also responded and many local internet cafes across urban
and rural areas began to offer a ‘BISP service’.
In the end the national roll-out of the PSC survey reached 27 million
households and identified 7.7 million
eligible women as beneficiaries, of whom 4.5 million are currently reported
to be receiving 4,500 (at 1,500 rupees per month) after each three months. For some of the poorest women in Pakistan
1,500 rupees is equivalent to ten days’ worth of wages from manual labour, and
receiving the cash transfer means that they and their families can eat better
for some days. Another less tangible yet
real change is the acceptance in patriarchal societies of women’s direct
interaction with government agencies, commercial banks (who are payment
agents), and markets (where women beneficiaries often go to spend their cash).
While there is still much to be done to improve the core cash transfer
element of the BISP (for example, ensuring that ALL eligible women are enrolled
as beneficiaries, making payment modalities more accessible, and updating the
programme database), we can confidently talk of successes too. These, in my mind, were due to a combination
of two distinct drivers. First, programme
design was based on state-of-the-art applications of data management systems and
technologies which were aimed at ensuring efficiency and transparency. Second, the programme remained aware of its
goal: to smoothly deliver cash to women of the poorest and some of the most
marginalized households in the country.
There were often synergies, but at times tensions between these two
drivers. Some of these tensions were
made visible, and then addressed, through exercises like the Process Evaluation. Going forward, such
synergies and tensions will remain. This is in the nature of such programmes. The important thing is for the BISP, and
other social protection programmes, to try to remain true to their original
goal of reaching out and making a difference to the weakest and the most
vulnerable. These are some of the
lessons that the new Chairperson and her team will doubtless consider as they
make their own mark on a programme that has delivered much and can deliver
more.
