I have spent time in flood-hit villages in Sindh and cramped one-room homes in peri-urban Punjab, watching women describe BISP payment days in precise detail: bus fares to disbursement points, hours in queues, biometric failures requiring return trips and, too often, agents quietly deducting their “share” before handing over what remains. This overlooked leakage is rarely part of the national debate on Pakistan’s social protection system, where attention stays fixed on state spending rather than how much actually reaches beneficiaries.

Over the past five years, Pakistan has channelled more than Rs 2.5 trillion into BISP, its largest social protection commitment, even as poverty rose from about 22 percent to nearly 40 percent, pushing around 20 million more people below the line while the program expanded. I do not say this to dismiss BISP, which has delivered real relief—helping with school supplies, medicines and short-term recovery after shocks—and, for many women, remains the only income that reaches them directly without mediation through male relatives, a reality that should not be minimized.

But two things can be true at once: BISP cushions shocks, yet as currently designed and run it cannot lift households out of poverty—partly because cash transfers were never built for that role and partly because a meaningful share of the money never reaches intended recipients. My work has taken me to a part of this debate often avoided: the claim that “cash transfers can’t beat inflation” is true but incomplete, as it........

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