Why SSPA?

The multidimensional poverty index (MPI), which highlights weak human capital accumulation and access to services, shows that Rural Sindh lags behind in comparison with other districts across the country. GoP (2016) ranks all the districts in the country on the basis of their MPI, and of the bottom 20 percent poorest MPI districts in the country, 36 percent (9 out of 25 districts) are from Sindh. In 2020, using the data from PSLM 2019-20, five of the bottom 20% districts are still from Sindh. Only two administrative units of Sindh (viz. all districts of Karachi Division and Hyderabad district) are among the national MPI ranking of top 20 percent districts.

The absence of strong provincial social protection capacity has hindered the efficient utilization of fiscal resources, and the roll-out of interventions for the uptake of existing human capital related services. Existing social protection efforts are fragmented, poorly-designed and targeted, and inadequately aligned with broader government priorities.  Although these efforts are cumulatively using significant fiscal resources (Rs 22 billion, for example, in 2016, according to a World Bank-led public expenditure review of the province), there is little documented evidence of impact and sustainability of these investments.  Government intentions for providing various forms of targeted social assistance have also been hampered (for example in the wake of the Covid19 pandemic and climate-related emergencies) due to the absence of a central social protection lead institutions with capacity for targeting, enrolment, coordination, monitoring and grievance redressal with requisite legal mandate.  There are important gaps with respect to collection, maintenance and verification of data on residents of the province and actual and potential beneficiaries of provincial social protection interventions.  The absence of a provincial social protection institutional capacity limits provincial government’s ability for rolling out state-of-the-art instruments (such as co-responsibility cash transfers or CCTs) for incentivizing and facilitating the target population to access human capital accumulation related services.