The Education Conditional Cash Transfers are an important pillar of Ehsaas and are included in the Ehsaas framework as Policy #73 ‘Education Conditional Cash Transfers’.
The Education Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT) serve the dual purpose of socially assisting vulnerable households and at the same time reduce the number of out-of-school children, which is an important outcome for Pakistan given that there are 18.7 million out-of-school children in the country.
Pakistan has been running an Education Conditional Cash Transfer for primary school-going children called Waseela-e-Taleem since 2012 in selected districts. The program encountered a number of challenges including the high administrative costs charged by NGOs that were administering the program, high error, and fraud due to the program being paper-based, weak compliance monitoring, limited human resource to enroll students into the program, and low stipend amount being given to children.
Also, it was limited to 5th grade and not including secondary education, whereas the latter could be of high impact.
Studies reveal that school drop-out rate increases with age especially for girls in classes 5 to 8, owing to the distance from the school and other associated costs. The previously run education CCT was limited in geographic scope and lacked appropriate federal-provincial partnerships. Also, payments to beneficiaries were being made through the old BISP payment system which was plagued by many challenges.
On the other hand, Ehsaas Education Stipends challenges is a cost-effective institutional infrastructure developed to implement programs nationwide with reliance on NGOs eliminated.
Because of this, the operational cost has been reduced from 8 to 3 percent. The end-to-end digitization of a number of processes has eliminated the space for abuse in terms of ineligible children being enrolled. The compliance monitors have been hired and a Project Monitoring Unit has been established.
Also, through an MoU with the National Commission on Human Development, additional 1000 staff members have been engaged to enroll students. The stipend amount has been doubled for primary school-going children and has been further increased for girls.
PKR
