Poor provide clues to cash transfer program’s defects

BAGUIO CITY—An official in the Ilocos region once offered to authorize beneficiaries of the government’s conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in Pangasinan to take home goods from a sari-sari store, which they would later pay using their future P1,400 grant allotments.

This took place shortly after then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo launched the CCT in Bangued, Abra, in 2008, said Leonardo Reynoso, Cordillera director of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).

A memorandum forbidding beneficiaries from using their CCT allotments in other transactions was quickly issued then, he said. “The official’s offer was noble because we knew he was trying to help.”

But his proposal was one of the first episodes recorded at the start of the CCT that alerted the DSWD to the possibility that anybody could misuse or abuse a program that has been criticized as a dole out instead of being praised as an innovative model for poverty alleviation, he said.

Each family under the program receives a monthly health care subsidy of P500 and an additional P300 each for the family’s three children who are of school age. The money is released in exchange for guarantees that all three children go to school and are subjected to regular medical examination and treatment in the closest government health facility.

Reynoso said the CCT system might not be foolproof, but policymakers have been learning a lot from 304,000 poor families who represented the initial CCT beneficiaries in 2008.

The government enlisted 13,630 poor Cordillera families, the first batch classified by the DSWD as “Set 1.” The region has four sets of beneficiaries today.

Reynoso said the first set had provided the DSWD clues to unintended and often unseen flaws in the CCT system, which the government is correcting as beneficiaries graduate from the first cycle of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), the official name of the CCT program.

“By learning from [the first batch of beneficiaries], the DSWD has been able to polish the system for the subsequent sets of [recipients],” he said.

Most of the lessons center on how participating agencies and beneficiaries behaved, Reynoso said.

He cited cases when teachers failed to log a CCT student on their attendance sheet—either by design or by accident—which affected the child’s record and subsidy. Lapses in reporting impact greatly on the CCT system, he said.