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 organizations in utilizing this data for research,
policy making and planning of development projects. This was stated by Minister
of State and Chairperson BISP MNA Marvi Memon during her address as Chief Guest
in the session “Leave no one behind” of Sustainable Development Conference
organized by SDPI here in Islamabad.
In her opening remarks, Chairperson BISP stated that
since inception of BISP in 2008 and onwards under current government, the motto
of BISP has been the same, not to leave anyone behind through scientific
prioritizing especially women, children, elderly, disabled, widows, illiterate
and malnourished both in the 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 is going to establish BISP Advisory Committee by inviting top notch
researchers and data analysts of the country to compare the new and previous
data and would determine the number of beneficiaries who have exited poverty in
the last seven years as a result of BISP interventions.
Chairperson BISP also stated that by making CNIC a
precondition for receiving BISP stipend, BISP has empowered women politically
besides their financial and social uplift. She informed that in order to
address social inequality, BISP has 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 the 1.7
million children of beneficiaries up to primary level.
Chairperson BISP also said that according to Impact
Evaluation Reports, BISP has brought poverty down by 10 percentage points and
has improved the nutrition levels of beneficiary children particularly girls.
She also informed audience about 60,000 BISP Beneficiary Committees (BBCs)
comprising of 1.7 million beneficiaries, in which they are educated on various
issues related to BISP, basic counting, nutrition, immunization, e-commerce and
climate smart projects.
In the end, the Minister invited all the researchers and
students all across the country to use BISP data for research purposes
particularly to study impact of BISP stipend on beneficiaries by comparing
their conditions with those who are not receiving the stipend.
