G2P Payments Around the World: How Governments Pay Citizens in 2026

On the morning a Kenyan cash transfer cycle opens, the queue at an M-PESA agent in Kisumu is mostly people over seventy. They dial a short code, confirm a PIN, and walk out with KSh 2,000 that the Treasury sent the evening before. Nobody in that queue thinks of it as a payments system. It is the pension. Government-to-person payments, or G2P, are the single largest reason poor households in developing economies hold a financial account at all, and the design choices behind them decide whether that account ever gets used for anything else.

This piece compares how five countries actually pay people in 2025-26, what the World Bank's latest data says about the global picture, and which lessons travel. India's own system is covered in depth in our guide to Direct Benefit Transfer; here it serves as a reference point.

The global picture: G2P built the account base

The World Bank's Global Findex 2025 is the best cross-country source. As summarised by CGAP's FinDev Gateway, 75% of adults in low- and middle-income economies now have an account, and 73% of people receiving government transfers are paid into one. Around 43% of adults in these economies opened their first account to receive social support or a wage. Still, 1.3 billion adults remain unbanked.

Contrast that with private wages. Only about 45% of private-sector wage earners are paid into an account, and just 32% of low-income wage earners. Governments, in other words, have digitised faster than employers. That gap is a policy achievement and a warning: a G2P account that is emptied in cash on payday does very little for financial inclusion beyond the first withdrawal.

The World Bank's G2Px programme, run with the Gates Foundation, frames the payoff in fiscal terms: digitised payments on shared rails reduce leakage, improve targeting and deter fraud. Its own presentation material cites an estimated 3.3% annual saving from centralising and digitising G2P payments, and research showing that during COVID-19, countries with existing digital ID and data-sharing systems reached over three times more beneficiaries than those that had to collect new data.

Brazil: one family registry, one bank, monthly

Bolsa Família is the archetype of modern conditional cash transfers. According to the Ministry of Social Development's June 2026 briefing, the programme reached 19.34 million families and 50.1 million people that month, with a total transfer of R$13.84 billion and an average benefit of R$677.66 per family.

Brazil's distinctive asset is the federal bank Caixa, which acts as the single paying agent. When the pandemic emergency aid launched in 2020, Glenbrook reported that Caixa received 11 million requests to open digital savings accounts in two days, through an app that was barely six months old. A World Bank review later credited Pix, wallets and pro-digital policy with getting 75% of emergency aid beneficiaries to use their funds digitally. Our explainer on Pix and Drex covers why that matters: once money lands in an account that talks to an instant payment system, cash-out stops being the default.

Kenya: welfare on mobile money

Kenya's Inua Jamii programme pays older people aged 70 and above, caregivers of orphans and vulnerable children, and caregivers of people with severe disabilities. A State Department for Social Protection release for the February 2025 cycle reported KSh 3.52 billion paid to 1,761,897 beneficiaries, KSh 2,000 each, with recipients told to dial *222# and withdraw at an M-PESA agent.

The appeal is obvious: Kenya already had agents in nearly every trading centre. The weakness is equally visible in the press coverage, which repeatedly reports cycles paid weeks late because the Treasury released funds late. A fast rail does not fix a slow budget. For more on why mobile money took root in East Africa, see our piece on M-Pesa and mobile money.

Philippines and Indonesia: the migration problem

The Philippines' Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) pays conditional grants to roughly four million households, through cash cards issued with the state-owned Land Bank; the DSWD reported 4.012 million household beneficiaries when it began crediting grants to cards in 2021. The 2025 budget allotted P114.1 billion to 4Ps, the largest single item in P253.3 billion of aid spending, GMA News reported. Digital delivery has measurable benefits for recipients: a World Bank study found that moving the second round of the pandemic Social Amelioration Program to digital payments cut average waiting time by 40 minutes.

Indonesia shows what happens mid-transition. In early July 2025, Social Affairs Minister Saifullah Yusuf said that the second-quarter PKH conditional transfer had reached over 8 million families with Rp5.8 trillion, and the Sembako food programme over 15 million families with Rp9.2 trillion, IDX Channel reported. But more than 3 million families had not yet been paid, largely because they were being moved from cash delivery by the post office to collective accounts at the state-owned Himbara banks. Over 1.3 million PKH families and nearly 2 million Sembako families were in that migration queue.

The lesson is uncomfortable for anyone who thinks digitisation is a one-way improvement. Switching channels is itself a source of exclusion. Indonesia kept the post office route for people with severe disabilities, the elderly and remote communities, which is a sensible design: digital by default, not digital only.

Togo: paying people the state could not see

Togo's Novissi programme in 2020 is the most cited example of G2P innovation. With no comprehensive social registry, the government registered informal workers by mobile phone and, for a rural expansion, used machine learning on phone and satellite data to target the poorest areas and people. According to J-PAL's case study, about 820,000 people received transfers worth around US$32 million overall, monthly payments were US$20-22, and the ML-based targeting reduced exclusion errors by 4-21% compared with blanket geographic targeting.

Novissi worked because Togo's mobile money operators were already there. It is a crisis tool, not a template for permanent welfare, but it showed that the hardest part of G2P is knowing who to pay, not moving the money.

Six programmes side by side

Worked example: what a missed cycle costs

The reported figures let us compute what each programme delivers per recipient, and what one missed payment means.

• Kenya: KSh 3,523,794,000 divided by 1,761,897 people is exactly KSh 2,000. One late cycle is the entire month's support for someone over 70 with no other income.
• Indonesia: Rp5.8 trillion across about 8 million PKH families averages roughly Rp725,000 per family for the quarter's disbursement. For the 1.3 million families stuck in the post-office-to-bank migration, that is about Rp950 billion in aggregate support delayed, money that exists in the budget but not in kitchens.
• Brazil: R$13.84 billion over 19.34 million families works out at about R$716, slightly above the published average benefit of R$677.66. The difference is plausibly supplements and extraordinary payments counted in the total, which is a reminder to read programme totals and per-family averages as separate numbers.

A fast rail does not fix a slow budget, and a new channel can exclude as efficiently as an old one.

What travels, and what does not

Across these systems, five lessons hold up:

1. Registry before rails. Brazil's family registry and India's Aadhaar-linked lists matter more than the payment channel. Togo had to invent a registry in weeks.
2. Choice beats a single provider. The World Bank's G2Px material cites Zambia, where letting recipients choose among providers increased competition, lowered prices and extended rural service.
3. Cash-out density decides usefulness. Bolivia's pension programme, studied by the World Bank, showed that limited access points forced recipients to withdraw everything and still travel far.
4. Migration is a risk event. Indonesia's 2025 queue is the clearest example. Run channels in parallel, not in sequence.
5. Interoperability is the long-term payoff. Brazil's emergency aid became a gateway to Pix. A G2P account that cannot pay a shop or receive a bill payment from a relative abroad is a dead end.

The same logic applies in emergencies; our upcoming piece on digital cash for disaster relief looks at how pre-built G2P rails changed response times after floods and cyclones.

What to watch next

• Indonesia's completion of the move from the post office to Himbara bank accounts during 2025-26, and whether the exempt groups keep a non-bank option.
• Brazil's monthly Bolsa Família releases through the rest of 2026, especially whether the share of benefits spent via Pix rather than withdrawn keeps rising.
• The next Global Findex round. Findex has reported in 2014, 2017, 2021 and 2025; the next edition will show whether the 73% of G2P paid into accounts translates into more saving and digital spending.
• India's next PM-KISAN instalment, following the March and June 2026 releases, as the largest single-day G2P credit run anywhere.

The countries that do G2P well have stopped thinking of it as a welfare cost centre. They treat it as the on-ramp to a country's payments system, and design it so the first transaction is not the last.

This article describes public programmes for research purposes and is not financial or legal advice. Programme rules and amounts change; check the relevant government agency for current eligibility.

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