Art Appraisal Blog

Consent forms are the backbone of data protection efforts worldwide, but there’s a problem: no one reads them. To protect people’s data, policy makers must go beyond consent.

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.

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.

As the world grapples with COVID-19, more than 50 countries, including the United States, have announced some form of cash transfer or social assistance to help tide over the immediate challenges faced by their citizens. Delivering on these promises will require an enormous increase in the capacity of states to make payments to their citizens, or government-to-people (G2P) transfers, as they are widely known.

Government-to-person (G2P) payments have never been more important, as governments worldwide seek for ways to respond to the economic and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The challenge of making these massive payouts to the poor and informal sector workers is highlighting the differences between the G2P payment ecosystems across countries.

Our message to countries is simple: Use what you have now to scale up quickly and build on your strengths to build back better systems. While every case is different, it is useful to compare countries at a similar stage of development and with a shared history. Together, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh constitute over one fifth of the world’s population and almost half of the global poor. This blog offers an initial view on the ways in which the JAM is being used to scale up support.

The COVID-19 response amounts to a significant expansion in the scale and scope of direct cash transfers as well as other social assistance—a huge increase in government-to-people (G2P) payments. As we explain in our new report, delivering on these programs will require an enormous increase in the capacity of states to implement them.