ISLAMABAD: “Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), being the premier social safety net programme of the country and the custodian of multidimensional precious data of 27 million households, has the responsibility to guide other development organisations in utilising this data for research, policy making and planning of development projects,” was stated by state minister and BISP Chairperson Marvi Memon. She was speaking as a chief guest in a session, “Leave no one behind”, of a conference organised by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), in Islamabad.
In her opening remarks, the BISP chairperson stated that since the inception of BISP in 2008, and onwards under the current government, the motto of BISP had been the same, not to leave anyone behind, prioritising especially women, children, elderly, disabled, widows, illiterate and malnourished, both in rural and urban settings across the country.
The minister said that on the basis of 2010-11 survey of BISP, a demographic directory containing district wise profiling of the population was developed in 2015.
Currently BISP is conducting state-of-the-art scientific resurvey to update the National Socio-Economic Registry (NSER) and in the pilot phase, data of 10 districts has been collected. She added that BISP was going to establish BISP advisory committee by inviting top researchers and data analysts of the country to compare new and previous data and would determine the number of beneficiaries who had exited poverty in the last seven years as a result of BISP interventions.
She stated that by making national identity cards a precondition for receiving BISP stipend, BISP had empowered women politically, besides their financial and social uplift. She informed that in order to address social inequality, BISP had disbursed Rs 539 billion in last ten years through cash transfers to its 5.4 million beneficiaries.
An amount of Rs 4.8 billion has been spent on the ‘Waseela-e-Taleem’ initiative to educate 1.7 million children of beneficiaries, up to primary level, she said.
The BISP chairperson also said that according to impact evaluation reports, BISP had brought poverty down by 10 percent and had improved nutrition levels of beneficiary children, particularly girls.
She also informed the audience about 60,000 BISP beneficiary committees comprising of 1.7 million beneficiaries, in which they were educated on various issues related to BISP, basic counting, nutrition, immunisation, e-commerce and climate smart projects.
The minister invited researchers and students all across the country to use Benazir Income Support Programme data for research purposes particularly to study impact of BISP stipend on beneficiaries by comparing their conditions with those who were not receiving the stipend.
Published in Daily Times, December 7th 2017.
