Pioneer beneficiaries to stay in CCT program

BAGUIO CITY—Most of the pioneer beneficiaries of the government’s conditional cash transfer (CCT) program would not be removed from the controversial poverty-alleviation project in December due to a proposal to extend the program, a Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) official said.

Leonardo Reynoso, DSWD Cordillera director, said the agency may continue to offer them up to P1,400 in monthly stipends to allow their children, aged 15 to 18, to complete high school.

The DSWD had set a five-year limit for the beneficiaries of the CCT or the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), and the first set, composed of 342,960 indigent families from 160 towns and cities in the country’s 20 poorest provinces, were supposed to graduate from the program at yearend.

Each eligible household receives a P500 stipend, plus an additional P300 for each of three children of school age. The beneficiaries lose their stipends when all children graduate from grade school.

Many of the first batch of beneficiaries came from Abra province, where the 4Ps was launched in 2008 by then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Dr. Esperanza Cabral, who handled the social welfare and the health departments in the Arroyo Cabinet.

In the Cordillera, the first set of beneficiaries was composed of 58,484 households. They represented 74 percent of the 79,000 poor upland households identified by the National Household Targeting System (NHTS), the mechanism by which the DSWD surveyed, profiled and authenticated the country’s poor families.

That number may soon increase, Reynoso said, because the next round of NHTS would document and profile families, instead of households. Asked to elaborate, Reynoso said households may actually be composed of extended families, who may not have been included in the initial 4Ps.

That increase in potential poor families may not be large, he said, because of the thoroughness of the first NHTS surveys.

The stipends are sustained provided the families make sure that the children stay in school, and are provided regular medical examinations. The families are also encouraged to attend peer counseling sessions designed to improve parenting and to offer alternative livelihood opportunities, Reynoso said.

It has not been easy being a 4Ps beneficiary, according to some mothers, who now act as “parent-leaders” of their communities.

Marilyn Babia, a parent-leader of Barangay Gabriela Silang in Baguio City, said they have been taunted in the neighborhood for supposedly wasting public funds, a criticism raised by 4Ps critics.

“It has been hard convincing people who have set their mind against [the CCT], but all we can do is to continue explaining the program’s value,” Reynoso said. Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon