‘When people should matter’ — In conversation with Qazi Azmat Isa – Pakistan

Qazi Azmat Isa is the executive director of the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund since 2011 and has been in the development sector for 30 years. He has worked tirelessly to transform society, empower the poor and give them a voice. And through these years, if there is a valuable lesson you have learned, it is to learn from people.

His organization supports the government's social protection program and contributes to achieving Vision 2025. It uses data from the poverty scorecard to help extremely poor households access opportunities that can get them out of poverty.

Isa talked to Sunrise Outside the Social Protection Week 2019: Securing the future of the region, organized by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) at its headquarters in Manila, Philippines.

1. How do you define social protection in the context of Pakistan?

In the context of Pakistan, social protection means providing a safety net to the poorest households, those who earn less than Rs10,000 per month. BISP beneficiaries are determined through a poverty scorecard. The safety net can take the form of transfers of pure cash (unconditional cash transfers) or cash with the warning that it will be spent on certain goods / services (such as health and education). Social protection can also be extended to provide benefits such as coupons that provide access to medical treatment or health insurance.

Related: Do cash transfers help the poor? Word spread that yes

2. What makes a good social protection program?

Inclusion and correct targeting make it a good social protection program. The inclusion of the poorest households, especially those that may not be easily identified (households headed by women, minorities, people with disabilities) and that are generally not visible in the mainstream. Providing these households with cash and / or benefits has a substantial impact on their ability to survive.

3. What social protection problems should governments be monitoring?

A government must monitor poverty trends and figures and establish a national poverty line using robust models to identify who the poorest groups are and monitor their well-being. The government should also analyze education / literacy and health statistics and design programs that support the inclusion and welfare of the poorest households through quality access to such public goods. Specifically, in Pakistan, the government needs to create a system that can track the progress of BISP households, a dynamic registry, to effectively target the poorest and stop providing stipends to those who no longer need it.

4. In your opinion, what is missing in the global debate on social protection that should be brought to the fore, now more than ever? Why?

The link between social protection and poverty reduction must be further emphasized. Social protection is a basic requirement to provide some safety net to the poorest members of a population. While poverty reduction focuses on providing opportunities and support to the poorest and poorest households to help them out of poverty. Governments are increasingly struggling to afford large social protection programs in continuity. This is why the evidence of what works to help households get out of poverty is extremely important. Building that evidence is what PPAF does.

5. Despite so many programs (BISP, medical insurance in KP, for example), why are there so many poor people in our country? Do you have figures that show how many people are covered by the social protection network? Where are we going wrong?

Structural inequalities and macroeconomic trends strongly impact poverty. By structural inequalities I refer to the existing land distribution system, social norms, caste and class differentials. These are replicated within the government and then it becomes difficult to break these invisible power structures.

The government covers 5.7 million homes under the BISP program. However, the BISP stipend provides a little more to these households for their consumption support, that is, more food, sometimes education and health. They cannot use the funds for economic activities. The graduation approach provides evidence that supporting many of these families through asset transfers and vocational training, and linking them to markets and value chains within their areas, helps them move up the poverty scale in a sustainable manner. We need to think in the line of creating economic opportunities and access for such homes. I believe that at least 70 percent of BISP households could be helped to be economically productive and stop needing the BISP stipend. It is very encouraging to see that the government has integrated graduation into its Ehsaas program.

The poor are not a single uniform group: a large number of households that need social safety nets have inherent potential that, if properly identified and addressed, can help them out of poverty. Some of the poor, however, always require support. Graduation is about allowing the extremely poor to escape poverty. With the right kind of flexible and responsive support, several ultra-poor and poor families can graduate to the next level of well-being, where they have opportunities to link up with other sources of market-based assistance and solutions, including microfinance. Social protection / poverty alleviation interventions, such as cash transfers alone, do not provide a comprehensive solution to the complex nature of rural poverty.

As the bulk of the poor graduate from poverty, the nature of social protection evolves to encompass labor market interventions, worker protection and the provision of insurance to mitigate the risks associated with injuries, disability and disasters At the same time, social assistance in cash or in kind will continue to the most vulnerable people or households without any other adequate means of support, including single parents, the homeless or the physically or mentally disabled.

6. What is the most important and most talked about topic worldwide in the face of universal social protection? Is it also from Pakistan?

Increasingly the world is looking at equity. Oxfam reported that the 26 richest people in the world own up to 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world's population. It can be said that capitalism in its current form has failed. Capitalism creates poverty and, unless well regulated, allows extreme poverty. The great debate worldwide is to curb the excesses of current capitalism and move towards more egalitarian societies. Social protection offers rich and poor countries the opportunity to help those most in need. However, the way this differs from one country to another. Taxes are unidirectional: Scandinavian countries have income taxes that exceed 50{7be40b84a6a43fc4fae13304fce9a2695859798abfc41afd127b9f8b21c5f9c5}, and that money is used to maintain a very high standard of living for all their populations.