Protecting the Poor in Pakistan
18 June 2007
One in four Pakistanis is poor and one in every two is considered vulnerable to falling into poverty. In a major move to address these tragic statistics, the Prime Minister of Pakistan has just approved a National Social Protection Strategy (NSPS).
This is a huge success for DFID Pakistan, as we have been
working with the
World Bank and the
Asian Development Bank since 2005 to support
the development of the strategy. At the same time, we have been building
government capacity to design, implement, monitor and evaluate social protection.
The Government of Pakistan recognises that social protection has a major role to play in promoting pro-poor growth and tackling exclusion and inequality, and the approval of the NSPS provides the direction and resources to take this forward.
The goals of the NSPS are:
- to support chronically poor households and protect them against destitution, food insecurity, exploitation, and social exclusion;
- to protect poor and vulnerable households from the impacts of shocks to their consumption and well-being that, if not mitigated, would push non-poor households into poverty, and poor households into deeper poverty; and
- to promote investment in human development (including health, nutrition, and education) by poor households to ensure that they are more resilient in the short run, and interrupting the intergenerational cycle of poverty in the medium to long run.
The Strategy recognises that cash transfers and social care services are critical for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, as well as for continued poverty reduction. The NSPS commits the Government of Pakistan to increasing spending on social protection, with an initial investment over the next five years of £300 million. It also commits the Government to increasing the number of poor who receive regular cash transfers from just over 2 million at present, to just over 6 million over the first five years of implementation.
At the request of the Government of Pakistan, DFID Pakistan will be supporting the national launch of the Strategy on 5 July. DFID is now considering how best to support the implementation of the NSPS over the next five years.
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