In this webinar Dr. Sania Nishtar, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, tells the spellbinding story of how, under lockdown, she rapidly created and scaled an emergency welfare system that could distribute life-saving cash to more than twelve million of the poorest people in Pakistan.

And Dr Nishtar is just one example of how system innovation is emerging in that part of Asia in response to crises. Anir Chowdhury, an advisor to the government of Bangladesh on digital innovation, describe how existing freephone numbers were repurposed to provide health advice, staffed by an army of hundreds of volunteer doctors.

Dr. Nishtar share with us how, in a matter of weeks, a new social safety net was stretched out beneath the most vulnerable families in Pakistan to make sure they did not fall into destitution. Through her talk, we discover how to create a system out of nothing when the need is pressing, and how different players from inside and outside government can be brought together in effective and creative collaboration.

Dr. Nishtar has an extraordinary background. A cardiologist, author and activist; she was one of the final three candidates to become the new leader of WHO; she founded Ehsaas, the Pakistan Government’s flagship social protection programme and she has brought about remarkable changes for her country as Special Assistant to the Prime Minister, combating poverty, inequality and improving social protection. Dr Nishtar co-chairs the U.S National Academy of Sciences Global Study on the Quality of Healthcare in low and middle-income countries and chairs the advisory board of the United Nations International Institute for Global Health.

As the Covid-19 crisis enveloped Pakistan, the government imposed a lockdown which meant that the millions of people who earned subsistence incomes in the informal, cash-in-hand economy would not be able to feed their families. The solution that Dr. Nishtar and her team created is the kernel for a new welfare system using mobile phones, text messages, AI and local retailers to distribute the cash. All of that required tremendous collaboration and connection between the private and public sector in an unprecedented way.

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