By Zehra Batool
As Islamabad hosts an international conference next week, the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund’s record points to what happens when communities are trusted to decide.
When the Government of Pakistan set up the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund in 1997, it made a bet that was easy to state and hard to carry out. The bet was that poor communities, given the right support, are better placed than anyone else to decide how they escape poverty. The Fund, known as PPAF, began operations in April 2000. Twenty-six years on, it is possible to ask what that bet has produced, and next week Islamabad will do exactly that.
On 13 and 14 October, the Serena Hotel will host the International Conference on Inclusive and Resilient Economic Empowerment and Growth, titled “From Poverty to Prosperity”. PPAF, which is a not-for-profit institution, will bring with it a large body of evidence gathered over more than two decades. The numbers are worth reading slowly, because behind almost every one of them is a household, and very often a woman making the decisions.
Start with reach. PPAF now works in 157 districts through 164 partner organisations. Its method rests on community institutions, which are local groups where people decide what they need and then act together to get it. About 171,200 such institutions have been supported, with 2.67 million members between them. Women make up 63 per cent of that membership, close to two-thirds of everyone involved.
The approach is meant to leave something behind, and the evidence suggests it does. According to PPAF’s figures, 82 per cent of households say that the community infrastructure schemes in their area are regularly maintained by the community itself. Anyone who has seen a hand pump or a link road fall into disrepair once the project team leaves will understand why that figure matters. A scheme that people built, and that they look after, tends to last.
The Fund’s best-known tool is probably the interest-free loan. Since 2014, PPAF has facilitated 3.69 million of them, with total disbursement of Rs 139.61 billion, a figure that includes reflows, meaning money repaid and lent out again. The average loan is about Rs 37,000 and the ceiling is Rs 75,000. These are not large sums, and they are not meant to be. They are the kind of amount that lets someone stock a small shop, or put together the capital for a modest enterprise, without taking on the burden of interest.
Women have received 57 per cent of these loans. The repayment rate across the programme is 98 per cent, which says something about the discipline and mutual trust inside the community groups that stand behind the borrowers. Lending to people with little collateral is often assumed to be risky. These figures point the other way.
The programme evaluation also looked at what happened to incomes. Average monthly household income rose from Rs 23,350 at midline to Rs 48,112 at endline. That is an increase of 106 per cent, or a little more than double. Income is only one measure of a household’s wellbeing, and no single study settles every question. Still, a doubling over the evaluation period is a result that few development programmes can point to.
Beyond household loans, PPAF has been working on the next step, which is helping small businesses grow and become part of the formal economy. Under its Growth for Rural Advancement and Sustainable Progress programme, known as GRASP, 1,091 small and medium enterprises have received training. Of these, 44 per cent are led by women. A total of 399 enterprises have gone on to receive matching grants to support their growth and investment. Another 803 have been formally registered, either with the Federal Board of Revenue or with the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan.
Registration may sound like paperwork, but for a small business it can change what is possible. It helps an enterprise connect to the formal economy, with everything that comes with that. For businesses in rural areas, which have traditionally operated outside it, that is a significant move.
The same thinking shapes PPAF’s work on livelihoods and skills. So far, 206,800 productive assets have been transferred to households, and 63 per cent of them went to women. The Fund has also provided skills and vocational training to 501,500 people, 45 per cent of them women. The outcomes for those trainees are encouraging. Among them, 57 per cent are self-employed, and 16 per cent are employed by others. PPAF’s support to small and medium enterprises has also contributed to the creation of more than 88,000 jobs.
Then there is the physical side of development, the less glamorous work of building things. PPAF’s community-driven approach has supported the construction of 35,290 community physical infrastructure schemes, which benefit about 17.57 million people. Because communities take part in building these schemes and then maintain them, the projects also strengthen the habit of working together, something that outlives any single road or water channel.
No account of PPAF’s record would be complete without climate and disaster, because in Pakistan the two are never far from any conversation about poverty. The Fund has put climate resilience, disaster preparedness and community recovery at the centre of its work. Since the 2005 earthquake, it has supported the construction of 122,000 earthquake-safe houses, along with 80 kilometres of protection walls that safeguard approximately 156,000 households.
Its environmental and energy work is substantial as well. Through 1,615 renewable energy projects, PPAF has added 18.56 MW of renewable energy capacity. It has helped conserve 2.23 million cubic metres of water and has planted 436,000 trees, of which 162,000 are olive trees.
The floods of recent years have tested this work. PPAF has supported more than 136,000 households through the floods of 2022, 2023 and 2025. In 2025 alone, 49,127 households across 45 districts were helped through 18 partner organisations. The response included 124 health camps and 141 veterinary camps. The latter matters more than it might appear to, since for many rural families livestock is the main store of savings, and protecting animals means protecting livelihoods. The aim, PPAF says, is to help communities restore essential services and be better prepared for the next flood.
The most closely watched part of the Fund’s work may be its approach to poverty graduation, which is the effort to move vulnerable households past immediate poverty towards sustainable livelihoods and greater economic resilience. Here PPAF has begun to look at how its work fits with the country’s largest social protection effort. A preliminary matching of PPAF registers with those of the Benazir Income Support Programme found 334,596 households common to both. Of these, 108,043, or roughly 32 per cent, were potentially eligible for graduation.
The word “preliminary” is important, and PPAF is careful to use it. But the finding hints at what coordination between the two systems could achieve. Many households already known to both programmes may be ready to move from receiving support to standing on their own.
What graduation looks like over time is the subject of a study by the International Growth Centre, which examined the National Poverty Graduation Programme. At the 2025 follow-up, 83.6 per cent of the households in the study were above the basic scorecard threshold. A smaller but still sizeable 57.7 per cent were above the sustainability benchmark, a tougher test of whether gains are likely to last.
The same study contains a warning. Approximately 30 per cent of households lost their productive asset in the 2022 floods. A family can do everything right, build up an asset and a livelihood over years, and see it washed away in a matter of days. The lesson PPAF draws is that resilience has to be built alongside graduation, not after it. Helping a household out of poverty is one task. Making sure it stays out is another.
That tension runs through the whole body of evidence, and it is likely to feature in the discussions at Serena Hotel next week. The record shows loans that are repaid, incomes that have risen sharply, women taking up roles as borrowers, entrepreneurs, trainees and members of community groups, and families who have been helped through floods by people close to home. It also shows how much can be lost in a single bad season.
Taken together, the figures do not describe a finished job, and PPAF does not claim they do. What they describe is a model that has been tested at scale, across 157 districts and more than two decades, and that has held up. The Fund’s central idea, that communities should lead, has gone from a hopeful principle to something with numbers attached.
For the partner organisations, community members and borrowers who produced those numbers, the conference is a chance to see their work recognised. For policymakers and researchers who attend, it is an opportunity to decide how much of this can be built on. If the evidence so far is a guide, the answer is quite a lot.
Zehra Batool is a freelance journalist. She can be reached at [email protected]
