Britain's Department of International Development (DFID) is likely to provide £279 million to the Benazir Income Support Program (BISP) as financial assistance for Waseela-e Taleem. Sources told Business Recorder here on Wednesday that DFID is likely to sign an agreement with BISP by the end of October this year for the release of the funds to BISP.
BISP has simultaneously launched an "Exit or Graduation Strategy" to help its recipients "graduate" out of extreme poverty. This includes the launch of four programmes namely Waseela-e Taleem, Waseela-e-Haq (Micro-finance), Waseela-e-Rozgar and Waseela-e-Sehat.
BISP's data based on the recently concluded poverty scorecard survey shows that over 71% children (of ages between 5-12 years) of beneficiary families have never been to school. Under Waseela-e Taleem children of beneficiary families aged 5-12 years will be supported for primary education and a cash transfer of Rs 200 per child (up to a maximum of three children) will be transferred to beneficiaries subject to their compliance with the required school attendance per family.
Under Waseela-e-Haq program, microfinance in the form of returnable soft loans up to Rs 300,000 are provided to beneficiaries, selected through a monthly computerised random draw, for setting up of small businesses. These loans are interest-free for the first 10 years after approval. So far, 29 draws have been held and a total of 34,807 beneficiaries have pre-qualified. An amount of Rs 1.502 billion was disbursed among 8,739 beneficiaries while 4,315 new beneficiaries had started their own businesses.
Through Waseela-e-Rozgar, BISP provides technical and vocational training to one member per beneficiary family. Training has commenced in the first quarter of 2012 and so far 1895 persons have been trained while 18,186 are currently enrolled. It is expected that by June 30, 2013 the total number of trained persons would be approximately 150,000.
Under Waseela-c-Sehat, life insurance cover of Rs 100,000 for the bread winners of recipient families was launched from January 1, 2011. Over 3.78 million beneficiary families have their bread earners covered under the life insurance scheme launched by BISP in collaboration with State Life Insurance Corporation of Pakistan (SLIC). Over 1764 death claims have already been processed by SLIC during FY 2011-12.
According to the data available with this scribe, till August 13, 2012 BISP has issued 1.59 million debit cards to its beneficiaries across the country including distribution of 13,135 debit cards in Azad Kashmir, 55,156 in Balochistan, 5 in Fata, 7,311 in Gilgit Baltistan, 418,333 in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, 551,141 in Punjab, and 553,155 in Sindh. The amount credited through these debit cards is Rs 4.79 billion. Data showed that the total number of selected beneficiaries of BISP had crossed 7 million.