Social protection as an area of government intervention is a recent development in Pakistan. While a plethora of safety net programmes have been implemented, there not no attempt to couch these interventions within an overarching social protection framework until a few years ago. This paper provides a political economy analysis of gender and social protection in Pakistan with a focus on the BISP and the Zakat programem. It analyses the extent to which gender has been integrated into their respective designs, barriers facing women in participating in the programmes and the quality of implementation with regard to gender.