DSWD prepares for household assessment

THE Department of Social Welfare and Development in Central Visayas (DSWD) is now preparing for the second round of its National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR) assessment this September.

DSWD Regional Director Mercedita Jabagat said that starting next month, the department will be hiring of 3,471 field staff that will assess the poor households in the region. These include area coordinators, area supervisors, enumerators, verifiers and encoders.

NHTS-PR assessment is conducted every four years to identify who and where poor households are in the country.

The data gathered will be used as the basis for various government agencies, non-government organizations and civil society in choosing the beneficiaries of their respective social protection programs and services.

NHTS-PR regional field coordinator Ruben Boybanting said the target households to be assessed were raised from an initial list of 869,000 to 1,016,269 to cover all poor households in Central Visayas.

Boybanting said that after the regular enumeration, they will conduct an On-Demand Application (ODA) and Validation of the collected data. ODA and Validation are two major activities made to support the household assessments and address issues on under coverage and inclusion of non-poor households. These processes aim to ensure the integrity of the database before sharing it to other government agencies and social protection stakeholders.

All identified poor households will be given a Unified Multi-Purpose Identification Card, he said.

Interested applicants may inquire from the DSWD-7 at 2329505 local 118.