Ehsaas Emergency Cash — Biometric Cashpoints Removing the PIN Barrier for Low-Literacy Women in Pakistan

When Pakistan launched the Ehsaas Emergency Cash programme in April 2020 to cushion the COVID-19 shock, programme designers had to reckon with documented evidence that women with low literacy and numeracy find PIN- and debit-card-based ATMs difficult to operate — a barrier that risked excluding the very women the cash transfer was meant to reach.
The programme's response was to disburse the PKR 12,000 (about $75) stipend exclusively through biometrically-enabled cashpoints — fingerprint verification at ATMs, designated retail shops and temporary payment camps — removing the need to remember a PIN, hold a card, or read a screen, while also ensuring that the registered woman herself, rather than a male relative, had to appear in person to collect the funds.
The World Bank documented that around 53.96% of payments were made directly to women, with 4.526 million women in the existing Kafaalat registry receiving guaranteed payments, and ranked Ehsaas Emergency Cash third globally by population coverage among COVID-19 cash-transfer programmes, reaching roughly 15 million households — about 100 million people.
Independent analysis by the Center for Global Development is candid about the design's limits: because eligibility still depended on owning a mobile phone and a national ID, and only 27.76% of poor women (versus 74.13% of poor men) owned a phone at the time, the biometric design solved the literacy barrier but not the underlying ownership gap — CGD estimated that up to 78% of poor women could be excluded from any future, non-registry-based expansion of a similar biometric-only model, a lesson both institutions flag for the design of future programmes.

Read the full analysis: https://www.bisp.gov.pk/