Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) is Pakistan's largest social safety net that provides income support to more than 5 million poor and vulnerable families. The long term objectives of the program include supporting the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to eradicate extreme and chronic poverty, to empower women and to achieve universal primary education. It is the promise of BISP that the right people receive the amount of benefit at the right time, in a transparent and efficient manner and with minimum error and misuse. To fulfill its promise, the program must be backed by scientific research. Scientific research not only helps to gauge the impact of program on the beneficiaries, but also assists to improve the program outreach, efficiency and transparency. BISP contracted Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) to conduct research on NSER. Using NSER. PIDE has produced series of studies under broad title of "Population of Pakistan: An analysis of NSER 2010-2011" which cover various topics including population structure, education, employment, disability, housing and poverty. It is premised that these studies would assist BISP to develop and implement evidence based targeted policies formulated on the results achieved from this multi-faceted analysis. At the end, I am very thankful to PIDE research team and appreciate their contribution in these reports. I would like to take this opportunity to express my deepest and most sincere gratitude to UNICEF for their financial support.

• Quetta