Ehsaas interest free loan

Islamabad: With the new injection of Rs5 billion to upscale Ehsaas Interest Free Loan (IFL) programme, SAPM Dr. Sania Nishtar convened a review meeting with the executing agency of Ehsaas Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) here Thursday to assess progress of IFL in 110 existing districts and to discuss the roadmap to upscale the programme across 28 new districts in lagging regions.

Launched in July 2019, Ehsaas IFL is the country’s biggest programme for poverty graduation, which will impact 14.7 million vulnerable people in four years with half of them women including youth, persons with special needs, transgender, minorities and marginalized communities. Overall, Ehsaas interest-free loans worth Rs. 41.9 billion have been disbursed to 1.19 million borrowers so far, of which 45 per cent are women.

“Ehsaas IFL is steering the socio-economic transformation of low-income communities countrywide, supporting them financially to establish small scale enterprises to improve their economic conditions. From July 2019 onwards, on average 80,000 interest free loans are being disbursed every month”, commented Dr. Sania. “The expansion to new 28 districts will be premised on the human development index ranking of districts, poverty profiling and economic needs of the districts so that dependence of populations at the bottom of economic pyramid can be reduced on government’s social safety programmes in these areas,” she said.