ISLAMABAD: Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Poverty Alleviation and Social Safety Dr Sania Nishtar on Saturday convened a consultative meeting with all four executing agencies under the stewardship of Ehsaas Programme to develop a collaborative perspective on standardized beneficiary targeting, which is one of the components of “One-Window Ehsaas” service.
Poverty Alleviation and Social Safety Division (PASSD) Secretary Mohammad Ali Shahzada, Pakistan Bait-ul-Mal Managing Director Aon Abbas Buppi and Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) CEO Qazi Azmat Isa attended the meeting.
Under the Ehsaas framework, social protection programmes are delivered through respective executing agencies and Ehsaas strategy stipulates that their impact can be maximised through integrated beneficiary service delivery. To serve the purpose, the creation of the One-Window Ehsaas service for all social protection operations has been commenced, which aims to assist beneficiaries and reduce duplication and abuse.
The service envisages actions in five areas, including creation of physical one-stop-centres, e-portal linking, Android app, cognitive API architecture approach and standardized beneficiary targeting.
“In order to better identify and characterise beneficiaries, standardized beneficiary targeting is a point of convergence for all the implementing agencies, executing several social protection and poverty alleviation programmes,” said Sania.
“Principally, standardized beneficiary targeting is critical for the implementation of the service and it will ensure policy coherence while reducing fragmentation and duplication. It will also be linked with all social protection initiatives so that benefits accruing to a specific household through multiple programmes can be tracked.”
The meeting discussed that in order to ensure integrated beneficiary delivery service, a shift needs to be made for all socio-economic targeting to use Proxy Means Test.
A new National Socio-economic Registry (NSER) is also being developed for improved beneficiary targeting. Once developed, it will underpin the service, which will enable the agencies to access data from the survey database in real time and ascertain eligibility of potential beneficiaries. The NSER survey is expected to be digitally accomplished by June, 2021.
