1.8m children enrolled under Benazir Taleemi Wazaif Programme

Author: APP

A total of 1.8 million children have been enrolled under the Benazir Taleemi Wazaif Programme with disbursement of Rs. 15 billion among the beneficiaries from May till October 2022.

The Programme is being executed by the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP). According to an official source, since inception of the Programme, 10.5 million children had been enrolled under the Benazir Taleemi Wazaif Programme which is a Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) intervention. The source conveyed that since inception of the Programme, 10.5 million children had been enrolled. The Programme was launched, recognizing that many children in BISP beneficiary households were not attending school, in the year 2012 through provision of additional cash per quarter to BISP beneficiary families for pursuing primary education.

Since July 2021, the scope of the Programme has been expanded from primary to secondary and higher secondary level, and is currently operational all over the country. Giving update on the statistics of Benazir Kafalat disbursements, the source told that an amount of approximately Rs. 49.84 billion has been disbursed among the beneficiaries of Benazir Kafalat Programme from May till October, 2022. The number of beneficiaries of the Kafalat Programme, which is an Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) initiative, have been increased from 7.2 million to 8.5 million during this period (May-October).

Currently, the number of enrolled/registered beneficiaries of the Kafalat programme is around 8.58 million. However, the present government has set a target to enhance this number up to 9 million by June 2023. The BISP Board has recently approved a policy to include transgenders under the Programme for which they are required to obtain a CNIC form NADRA clearly mentioning their gender as ‘transgender’. About the Targeted Petroleum Subsidy Programme, the source told APP that an amount of approximately Rs 17.35 billion had been distributed among around 8.67 million beneficiaries under the initiative from May-October, 2022.