The social safety net or social protection programme enables the government to advance the well-being and security of citizens by protecting them from vulnerability and deprivation so they can pursue a better life. The purpose of the family card, proposed by the new government, seems to be the same. Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, during an inter-ministerial meeting held on February 19, instructed the launch of the programme. On the same day, a 15-member cabinet committee led by Finance Minister Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowdhury was formed. The high-powered committee includes ministers, advisers and secretaries who will finalise the beneficiary selection process and eligibility criteria, and propose a rollout mechanism of the initiative. The committee will identify marginalised and low-income families in one upazila per division for the pilot phase to test the programme starting this Ramadan before rolling it out across the country.
The family card programme reportedly has an ambitious target of reaching five crore families eventually and would offer more than double the benefits currently provided under the existing social safety net schemes. At the planning stage, several factors need to be considered. If the weaknesses of the existing social safety net programmes are not taken into consideration during design, implementation and monitoring, the family card may end up like the older programmes.
The social safety net programmes in Bangladesh, with provisions for cash, food and assets, are expected to reduce and ultimately alleviate poverty and food insecurity. As per Article 15 (d) of Bangladesh’s constitution, it shall be a fundamental responsibility of the state to attain a constant increase of productive forces and a steady improvement in the material and cultural standard of lifeof the people through planned economic growth, with a view to securing its citizens’ right to social protection, that is to say, to public assistance in cases of underserved want arising from unemployment, illness or disablement, or suffered by widows or orphans or in old age, in other such cases.
Bangladesh has a fairly long history of social safety net programmes (SSNPs), the first undertaken immediately after independence in 1971. Since then, the number of total schemes implemented is over 120. The country spent about 16 percent of the national budget on SSNPs in recent years, which is 2.5-3 percent of the GDP, covering about 35 percent of citizens. However, a vital question is whether the benefits of the SSNPs reach the targeted beneficiaries—poor households and the vulnerable population?
According to Bangladesh’s 8th Five-Year Plan, there are high exclusion and inclusion errors in the existing SSNPs. However, there is no recent data to estimate the errors, which is necessary to assess beneficiary selection or targeting efficiently. The current process of beneficiary selection often relies on individual knowledge rather than the collection and evaluation of standardised data. Details about people’s income and how much land they own are not checked for accuracy. Due to poor monitoring, it is not possible to have accurate information on the weaknesses of the SSNPs in Bangladesh. However, it is apparent to those who know the programmes that they have very high exclusion and inclusion errors.
Besides, there is no robust, standardised, and operational grievance system for the safety net programmes. Also, regular monitoring and “cleaning” of the beneficiary registry is not done to remove people who are no longer eligible for various reasons, such as death, to make way for eligible, genuine new applicants to the programmes.
Bangladesh adopted the National Social Security Strategy (NSSS) in 2015. The strategy is scheduled to end in 2026. It is a commitment to address the triple problems of poverty, vulnerability, and marginalisation, and it provides a roadmap for establishing a lifecycle-based social protection system covering people’s needs over their entire lifetime. It adopted a lifecycle approach developed by William Beveridge, which involves long-term planning of programmes directed at different stages of life, such as childhood, school age, youth, working age and old age. Over the years, these systems have evolved globally through trial and error and incremental innovations. Taking into consideration risk factors such as natural disasters, climate change and food price shocks, policymakers aimed to create social safety nets, usually in the form of cash, food and other kinds of support, to improve the socioeconomic conditions of people living in poverty.
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The adoption of NSSS coincides with the beginning of the new era of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which set out a global commitment to reduce poverty following the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Since the duration of the current strategy is due to end this year, a new strategy needs to be formulated and adopted, which requires a lot of attention by the government and all relevant stakeholders.
Any large-scale SSNPs are ideally required to follow a life-cycle approach covering all the stages of life. There are many factors which can cause or exacerbate poverty and can occur at any point in a person’s life. The NSSS brought together all SSNPs under five broad themes to align with the lifecycle approach. The needs are different at different stages of life, and families require different support depending on the age of the family members, and vulnerability conditions such as disability, sickness, poverty level, etc. Therefore, no single social SSNP can replace all the existing programmes. A single programme—family card—will not be able to cover all, as programmes are age-specific, implemented by different ministries and departments, and do not necessarily use cash as the only support tool. For example, the objectives of the mother and child benefit programme are to ensure nutrition and good health of women and newborns up to 1,000 days through a combination of cash payment, training of pregnant women and lactating mothers of poor families on parenting, and taking good care of their babies, and ensuring vaccination.
Ultimately, the success of the government’s ambitious family card programme will depend entirely on its execution. If it inherits the systemic flaws of past social safety net schemes—such as unverified data, poor targeting, and weak monitoring—it risks becoming just another inefficient programme. Moreover, as the current NSSS concludes this year, it is crucial to recognise that a single card cannot address all human vulnerabilities. The upcoming strategy must seamlessly integrate the family card with the proven lifecycle approach, ensuring that specific needs like child nutrition, maternal health, and elderly care are not sidelined. A transparent, data-driven, and comprehensive social protection system is the only way forward to sustainably uplift the nation’s poor and marginalised.
Dr Nawshad Ahmed, a retired UN official, is an economist and urban planner. He is currently working as the team leader in a primary school infrastructure need assessment project for the Department of Primary Education, Dhaka. He can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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