Pakistan is one of the country’s most vulnerable to natural and human-induced disasters worldwide.
In the past fifteen years it has experienced large-scale earthquakes, floods, droughts and complex emergencies. Its humanitarian preparedness and response capacity has developed tremendously in that time. Pakistan already has significant experience of major humanitarian cash transfer programmes and is actively building on this foundation.
The World Humanitarian Summit’s Grand Bargain (United Nations, 2016) stressed the need to “work together efficiently, transparently and harmoniously with new and existing partners” to move to a more “demand-driven model more responsive to the people we are assisting”. The Grand Bargain’s purpose is to “get more means in to the hands of people in need”. The Government of Pakistan, alongside many of the humanitarian and development partners and practitioners providing assistance to disaster-affected people in the country, fully support this purpose.
The Grand Bargain’s third commitment is to increase the use and coordination of cash-based programming. The document notes that, while not a panacea suitable in all responses, cash assistance does help deliver “greater choice and empowerment to affected people”. Cash programming should use, link or align with local and national mechanisms such as social protection systems. Aid organization and donors committed to action in six areas:
Increase the routine use of cash alongside other aid instruments.
Invest in new delivery models to increase scale.
Build an evidence base to assess the costs, benefits, impacts and risks of cash.
Collaborate in cash programming to better understand risks and benefits.
Ensure coordination, delivery, monitoring and evaluation systems are in place.
Increase the use of cash programming beyond the current low levels.
This Country Cash Profile demonstrates how Pakistan has forged ahead in the use of cash transfers to address disaster impacts in recent years, learning from experience, and how it proposes to achieve the commitments outlined above. The Profile will provide a snapshot of some of the most significant cash-based programming in Pakistan today, whether provided by government or the humanitarian and development community. It will summarize some recent initiatives on coordination and innovation for humanitarian cash transfer programming and touch on government and private sector delivery mechanisms. Finally, it will describe the Government of Pakistan’s initiative to create a national mechanism for humanitarian cash transfers that, piggy backing on existing, large-scale systems for social protection, bio-metric identity verification, grievance redress and payments, will be truly shock-responsive.