Poverty is one of the major concern in developing countries whereas Social Safety Nets (SSNs) are considered a window to improve lives of the poor. In Pakistan, various SSNs are functional, both in government and private sector. The present study made a comparison of Zakat and BISP to evaluate the effectiveness, targeting accuracy and welfare impact of both the Zakat and BISP on recipients on a wide range of indicators including consumption, headcount poverty, multidimensional poverty index, child school enrollment and women empowerment. To carry out this study, data from the latest available 2013/14 round of HIES is used which covers the sample 17,989 households. The overall reported data of Zakat is HIES is under-reported as only 0.6 percent of the household reported as recipients of Zakat and 7 percent of the household reported that they got benefit from BISP programme. A comparison is done by comparing the socio-demographic profile of recipients of Zakat and BISP, and found that recipient households of both the Zakat and BISP are at a disadvantageous position as compared to the non-receiver households almost on all the sociodemographic and economic indicators. However, BISP beneficiaries possess more assets i.e. livestock, land and ownership of house. Regarding the performance of the programme, Zakat has quite limited coverage as compared to BISP. Same is the case with targeting where BISP has much better targeting of 42 percent as compared to Zakat (23%). However, concentration of BISP beneficiaries is much high in bottom quintile, poverty and multidimensional poverty as compared to Zakat recipient households. Regarding the welfare impact, the study found positive welfare impact of cash assistance on per capita monthly food consumption, head count poverty and to extent impact was also observed on multidimensional poverty index, however study has not found impact on child school enrollment and partial impact was observed on women empowerment. Supervisor:-Dr. Usman Mustafa