On Tuesday, December 12, 2023, Dr. Rasid Bajwa, Chief Executive Officer, National Rural Support Programme (NRSP) delivered an online lecture to the participants of 34^th SMC on “Social Protection and Poverty Alleviation”. His discourse highlighted the differences between Social Protection and Poverty Alleviation. While Social protection aims to reduce poverty and vulnerability though income support, poverty alleviation, he said, intended to lift people out of poverty permanently. He provided an overview of various approaches to measure poverty such as consumption based, Cost of Basic Needs approach and Multidimensional Poverty Index, which Pakistan adopted in 2016. The guest speaker also spelt out the need for high GDP growth rate specially against the backdrop of a high population growth rate. He gave the example of China, which came out of poverty by adopting one child policy”. He also appreciated the work done by BISP in protecting people from falling into poverty, yet he stressed the need for people to graduate out of social protection network and improve their long-term economic prospects through poverty alleviation strategies like job creation, skills training and microfinance.