Art Appraisal Blog

Globally, the expansion of social assistance is among the most common public policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The challenge of quickly determining who would be eligible for these transfers highlighted gaps in information about workers in the informal sector and their families and other vulnerable groups. This review of some early international experiences of scaling up social assistance in response to the pandemic reveals the importance of certain ‘assets’ such as a robust digital identification system and other key registries.

The financial impact of COVID-19 has been hitting the poor. Governments are adjusting cash transfer programs and utilizing national payment systems to mitigate these negative impacts. This blog reviews responses from Latin America, Asia and Sub Saharan Africa where governments with limited resources are coming up with innovative solutions to the crisis.

Around the world, cash transfer programs are being implemented by governments in response to COVID-19. Pakistan introduced the Ehsaas Emergency Cash Program, which requires mobile phones and national IDs to register. Using data from the 2018 Financial Inclusion Insights survey, we estimate large gender gaps in mobile phone ownership and national ID possession, leaving women are at risk of being disproportionately excluded from the program. To address this, the government should ensure women are more purposefully targeted, perhaps by reserving more slots for women or prioritizing women's registrations.

Digital payments are central to the global COVID-19 response, but the agent networks that distribute these funds are struggling to remain open. Here are three questions policy makers must answer to ensure agents reach as many people as possible.

As COVID-19 accelerates the shift to digital finance, we need to make sure women are not excluded.

The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the need for a universal and portable social protection system that can uniquely verify people and deliver benefits efficiently and at scale.

This event will highlight the opportunities and challenges of using COVID-19 financial transfers to individuals and MSMEs to build better digital payments infrastructure

NITI Aayog and MSC will host a webinar on 5th June, 2020 at 7 p.m. IST/1:30 p.m. GMT to explore the lessons from India’s experience with digital G2P payments, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic response.

In the first blog from our new series on lessons from India for the world, we will look at the basic components of the digitized G2P ecosystem that enabled India to support beneficiaries even when the whole country was under lockdown. We will follow this with detailed modules on each component.

As shown by the technical underpinnings of its Ehsaas emergency program, Pakistan has all of the necessary building blocks to roll out its digital payments system and expand access to mobile money. It should seize the opportunity.