Nagad eases disbursement of social safety net allowance services

Mobile financial services (MFS) provider Nagad has made easy the disbursement of social safety net allowances’ services to the recipients across the country, ensuring transparency.

Before switching to digitalization, the social safety net allowances and education stipends were riddled with anomalies, with ghost beneficiaries, relatives of local public representatives and the non-poor getting into the list, leaving out many deserving people, said a press release.

Now, the situation has totally changed after Nagad digitalised the entire disbursement system of social safety net allowances maintaining transparency.

In 2021 and 2022, Nagad disbursed 75 percent of all the social safety net allowances, such as old-age allowance, widow allowance, allowance for the underprivileged with special needs and students with special needs.

Also, the MFS provider said before it entered an agreement with the Directorate of Primary Education (DPE) on December 13, 2020, the government had no other option but to halt primary stipend disbursements for a year due to irregularities and a lack of transparency in the prior distribution system.

In 2021-22 fiscal, Nagad disbursed stipends among over 1.25 crore primary school children with “transparency and accuracy, bringing an end to numerous hassles that many guardians experienced before.”

Earlier, the government used to disburse primary education stipends as per the government-to-person (G2P) payment system issued by the Ministry of Finance. Now there is coordination between the Finance Division’s G2P system and the DPE’s integrated digital system for the stipend payout.

Students are registered on Nagad’s digital platform using information from their birth certificates and mobile phone numbers alongside the NIDs of their guardians. So, once the stipends are disbursed, students’ guardians instantly receive the funds with cash-out charges to their Nagad accounts. 

To check school dropouts and keep female students in classes, the government introduced primary stipends in 1999. It currently disburses stipends to 1.4 crore schoolchildren across the country.

Nagad Chief Commercial Officer Md Shihab Uddin Chowdhury said: “As part of our people-centric endeavours, we have digitalised disbursements of social protection allowances and stipends and ensured transparency.”

“We have brought an end to all the irregularities that prevailed until we took the responsibility,” he continued.