(INQUIRER FILE PHOTO)
CEBU CITY, Cebu, Philippines — The government has removed 17,639 beneficiaries from the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) in Central Visayas since January, the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) said.
Leah Quintana, the DSWD regional information officer, said those removed from the list did not comply with some requirements, such as sending children or other members of the household to school and losing contact with beneficiaries who changed residence or relocated without notice.
Cebu had the most number of delisted beneficiaries in the region at 7,897 as of Aug. 2, followed by Bohol (4,918), Negros Oriental (4,740), and Siquijor (84). Quintana said the replacement for the delisted beneficiaries will come from the identified poor households on the agency’s list.
Among the requirements for a household to be admitted to the 4Ps program include having a pregnant household member; having school-age children or those until age 18; and the willingness to comply with the program’s rules.
“Even if you are poor, but you do not have children age zero to 18 in school, you can’t be a member of the 4Ps. You can, however, avail of the other programs of the department,” Quintana said.
According to the DSWD, 4Ps is a poverty reduction strategy that provides grants to extremely poor households to improve their health, nutrition, and education, particularly of children aged 0 to 14.
Together with the psychosocial and educational components of the Family Development Sessions (FDS), the government hopes to improve and sustain the well-being of the beneficiaries.
The DSWD has designed a rating system to delineate poverty thresholds using the Proxy Means Test, a statistical model that approximates household income based on household characteristics, such as educational attainment, livelihood or occupation of household members, and the appliances, pieces of furniture, and other household assets they owned.
‘Graduates’
Data on the targeted poor households were collected through a comprehensive, objective, and transparent house-to-house assessment.
Quintana said some of the beneficiaries already graduated from the program after being assessed as already “self-sufficient households.”
Based on the DSWD’s latest records, a total of 374 program beneficiaries in Central Visayas have graduated from the program in 2022 alone.
According to Shalaine Marie Lucero, the officer in charge of DSWD Central Visayas, the department conducts regular assessments to determine which households no longer need the cash aid from the government.
In 2019, then President Rodrigo Duterte signed into law an act institutionalizing the 4Ps to “promote a just and dynamic social order thereby uplifting its citizens and marginalized sectors from poverty through policies that provide adequate social services, promote full employment, a rising standard of living, and an improved quality of life for all.”