In a village near Sahiwal, some years ago, I met a woman who had taken one of our interest-free loans, 30,000 or 40,000 rupees, and opened a small roadside hotel. By the time I met her, it had four branches. She is the exception, and I know it; most of our loans buy a goat or a sewing machine, and our evaluation of the loan programme found household income roughly doubling, to about 48,000 rupees a month. Her story says in one sentence what the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) exists to do. What it leaves out is the part I now think about most: the loan explains how she got out of poverty, and nothing in it explains how she has stayed out. That is the question PPAF is putting to the International Conference on Inclusive and Resilient Economic Empowerment and Growth in Islamabad on 13 and 14 October, under the banner From Poverty to Prosperity.

The Pakistan Economic Survey, published in June, carried the first poverty estimate since 2018-19: the share of Pakistanis below the national poverty line rose from 21.9 per cent to 28.9 per cent, and to 36.2 per cent in the countryside. A........

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