There are currently over one million beneficiaries of the social cash transfer programme in Zambia.
Social Cash Transfer Project (STCP) Coordinator, Stephan Chiwele, said the beneficiaries have since received their January and February funds and are currently waiting for Mach and April payments.
“We have a total of one million and twenty seven thousand beneficiaries countrywide and in terms of payment, we are up to date,” he said.
Mr Chiwele added that in order to curb some challenges encountered by both the beneficiaries and the social welfare officers, government has introduced a digital payments system which will start operating soon.
“We are in the process of rolling out digital payments in order for us to improve the service delivery of our transfers. We want a situation where payments will be disbursed on time,” he said.
He stated that the digital payments system will enable the social cash transfer managers to track the disbursement of funds to all beneficiaries in all the districts.
Mr Chiwele this will also make it easy to identify beneficiaries who have received and who have not.
“We have started with the pilots in Kitwe because Kitwe is pre dominantly urban and Namwala is dominantly rural and that’s the comparison and the success rate was high and the commendations were that we roll out to other districts because with digital payments, accountability becomes much easier,” he said.
Mr Chiwele said there are however other systems that have been rolled out.
He said one of the systems is the establishment of a channel that will enable beneficiaries to lodge complaints that will be attended to in a shortest period of time.
The fruits of PFs labour are coming to fruition
While it’s commendable that GRZ is doing something to mitigate people’s suffering, this isn’t a good statistic to be proud of. As we increase the number of beneficiaries the more it becomes clear that we don’t have a plan to alleviate poverty. People become dependent on these tokens and you could see the stress when payment is delayed. Some children even wait for their elderly parents to be paid for them to get a share. We must bring back dignity in homes by rolling out programs that will make people self-sufficient and obviously this isn’t one