JazzCash channels PKR 90bn to public sector, development beneficiaries in 2026: Arif Chaudhary

JazzCash has disbursed over PKR 90 billion on behalf of government and development sector partners so far this year, reaching more than three million beneficiaries. Roughly half of them, 1.48 million women under the Benazir Income Support Programme, now receive their payment directly into their JazzCash wallet rather than collecting it in person.

“For years, someone would travel to a distribution camp, queue for hours, and go through an ID and fingerprint check, and by the time they got home, the trip itself had cost them close to a tenth of what they’d come to collect,” said Arif Chaudhary, Vice President for Public Sector Partnerships at JazzCash.

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BISP supports over twelve million low-income households, and for most of its history, collecting a stipend meant a trip to a distribution camp and sometimes waiting in queue. Chaudhary said closing that gap, rather than simply moving money faster, was the point of building the wallet rail in the first place.

Around 40% of Pakistan’s adult population remains unbanked, and government to person disbursement, welfare payments like BISP chief among them, has become one of the widest channels for reaching them.

Arif said the harder problem when JazzCash entered this space was not demand but trust: verifying beneficiaries who often had no prior banking history, without slowing down payments people rely on to get by. That approach has since carried over to more than a dozen programmes across all four provinces and the development sector: Punjab’s Rahmat Card; Sindh’s Girls Stipend Programme; training stipends for Balochistan’s Provincial Institute for Teacher Education and Assessment & Examination Commission; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s disaster management authority; Punjab’s Zakat programme; and stipends for WHO supported polio workers and UN World Food Programme beneficiaries. Each runs on the same verification backbone, adapted to that programme’s own disbursement method, whether wallet, cash, or a hybrid of both.

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Arif said the plan over the next two to five years is to deepen the BISP model and replicate it across new welfare, pension and subsidy programmes as government partners move away from cash. JazzCash is also investing in scam awareness, Chaudhary said, and building credit, savings and insurance products on top of the same wallet base BISP beneficiaries now use. “The wallet is often someone’s first digital financial product,” he said. “Once a government payment puts them on it, the rest becomes possible too.”