ISLAMABAD: Ehsaas has successfully accomplished a countrywide National Socio-economic Registry Survey.

The survey includes households’ information in terms of geographic data, demographics, socio-economic status, education, health, disability, employment, energy consumption, assets, communications, agri-landholdings, wash, livestock etc. To celebrate the achievement of this milestone, Ehsaas hosted a launch event in Islamabad, says a press statement issued here on Thursday.

Special Assistant to Prime Minister (SAPM) Senator Dr Sania Nishtar, chaired the ceremony. Najy Benhassine, Country Director of the World Bank, Julien Harneis, Resident Coordinator UNRC, Secretary Ismat Tahira, and senior representatives of Government Departments, Asian Development Bank, development partners and media officials joined the event.

Director General Naveed Akbar outlined the design, end to end digital methodology, approaches and rigorous transparency measures embedded in the execution of survey. In her opening remarks, Dr Sania said, Part of Ehsaas strategy, we have just concluded a new National Socioeconomic Registry of 34.41 million households. She said we did various validations of the data to precisely identify the real poor.

She said with the readiness of survey, we are now transiting from static to dynamic registry to make it more targeting efficient and to avoid possible inclusion and exclusion errors occurred due to continuous change in socio-economic status of the households especially due to demographic change.

She said Tehsil level Ehsaas Registration Desks have also been opened all over the country to keep the national socio-economic registry dynamic. Further, the registry will be regularly updated every four years. She then congratulated the Ehsaas team on successful completion of the survey.

Dr Sania said this is a great achievement as despite COVID-19, this survey has been completed after a lag of ten years. Speaking on the occasion, Country Director World Bank congratulated the Government of Pakistan and Ehsaas on achieving this historical milestone.

He said the World Bank feels proud to be the technical partner in this game changer survey. This is not just Pakistan’s but also South Asia’s first digitally enabled socio-economic census. He said it will be really transformative that the registry will now facilitate data sharing for social protection programs of federal government, provinces, government departments and development agencies.

According to the statement, the Ehsaas conducted a door-to-door computer aided survey all across the country to gather data about the socioeconomic status of households. With the conclusion, this will be the most reliable dataset for the use of public sector institutions, think tanks and development agencies for designing social protection and poverty alleviation programmes.

The data sharing will be steered through the Cognitive API Architecture approach. There will be two-way data sharing; agencies with whom data will be shared will also be required to update the registry with their own information.