Minister of State/Chairperson Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) MNA Marvi Memon has said that BISP is the pioneer for pro-poor policy making based on quality data obtained through nation-wide poverty score card survey. This survey is first of its kind in South Asia and enables BISP to identify eligible households through the application of a Proxy Means Test (PMT) that determines welfare status of the households on a scale between 0-100.
She was addressing at the Data Launch Ceremony of Rural Household Panel Survey (RHPS) organized by Pakistan Strategy Support Program (PSSP) where she was invited to chair the event. Rural Household Panel Survey aims to provide quantitative basis to identify and address urgent economic policy priorities. The RHPS covers 2090 households in 76 primary sampling units in the rural areas of three provinces namely Punjab, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In her opening remarks, Chairperson BISP praised the efforts of PSSP for providing support to the government with evidence based research for policy making. She also said that panel datasets are important to observe the dynamics of socio-demographic and economic factors which cannot be captured by cross-sectional surveys.
Discussion on poverty and its trends in Pakistan is primarily based on cross-sectional datasets, with very little attention being paid to its dynamics ie chronic and transitory poor. BISP is also conducting a panel data survey to observe the potential outcome of its interventions like Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) and Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT). She said that in the current development debate, inclusive growth is a new loom to look at socio-demographic and economic progress of a nation. It refers to mass inclusion of poor and vulnerable in decision making processes so that the benefits of growth could be equitably distributed for the wellbeing of the society by reducing poverty, hunger, inequality and providing productive employment generation.-PR
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