Rs80 bn education CCTs expanded to 154 districts under Ehsaas

ISLAMABAD: The Education Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) programme worth Rs80 billion has been expanded and massively reformed under Ehsaas to bring five million deserving primary school children into its fold from across all 154 districts of Pakistan over four-year duration.

According to the Economic Survey 2020-21 unveiled by Minister for Finance and Revenue, Shaukat Tarin in a press conference held here Thursday, the programme initially covered primary school enrollment of 3.69 million children, supply capacity assessment of 160,246 public and private schools, constitution of 100,505 beneficiary committees for social mobilisation and disbursement of Rs15.7 billion as of 30-06-2020.

Over the last year and a half, a comprehensive and deep-rooted reform was designed and deployed as a result of which far reaching changes have been made in the programme.

According to the four key pillars of reform, a number of processes were end-to-end digitised which were previously managed manually. Apps have been developed which are used by staff to register children and monitor compliance.

Secondly, cost-effective changes in institutional infrastructure were made to expand this programme nationwide and eliminating reliance on NGOs due to which the operational cost has been reduced from 8 percent to 3 percent.

Thirdly, the stipend given to children has been modified as per Ehsaas’ new stipend policy under which children of poorest families will now be provided conditional cash grants of Rs1,500 for a boy child and Rs2,000 per quarter for a girl child on attainment of 70 percent attendance in school. Finally and most importantly, the programme is being expanded to all districts of the country.