DSWD studies cash transfer for homeless

BAGUIO CITY—The success of the government’s conditional cash transfer (CCT) program will always draw suspicion from people who meet homeless families living in Metro Manila’s streets or the mentally ill drenched and shivering in Baguio’s rains.

This is a sector of the very poor who could not be included in national household surveys that help the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) identify its CCT beneficiaries, said Leonardo Reynoso, DSWD Cordillera director.

Reynoso said the agency was designing a version of the CCT for this sector of the poor, but planning had been slowed down because the homeless of many cities, such as Baguio, are usually transient and have no permanent residence.

He cited Badjao families, who shuttle between Dagupan City, Pampanga and Baguio, making it difficult for social workers to track them down.

Different design

Coralie Dulnuan, a Baguio social worker, said this sector does not qualify for the CCT with the way the program is designed.

The CCT is a transactional aid program because it requires the mothers of a beneficiary family to ensure their children are enrolled and are present in class and that the family members avail themselves of medical examinations at the nearest government health facility.

In exchange, the government provides them up to P1,400 monthly, representing a P500 monthly stipend and P300 for each of the beneficiary family’s first three children who are in elementary school.

No known families

Dulnuan said the composition of Baguio’s homeless, for example, are  individuals with no known families or those suffering from a form of mental illness and have resisted help from government social workers.

Reynoso said the DSWD might try a new program for families living in the streets of Metro Manila, but it had yet to design a program for individual street dwellers because their profiles were too different to fall under a uniform program.

Even the basic livelihood training projects of the agency will not lure some of the homeless off the streets, he said.

Not invisible

But these people are not invisible to the government, said Dulnuan, who has served as social worker for three years.

Dulnuan said the DSWD and the City Social Welfare and Development Office (CSWDO), where she works, had already compiled information on street people, dating back to the early 1990s.

That was the decade when residents began to observe the rise in mentally ill people living in the streets.

The advisory council of Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center tried to address the problem by providing a mechanism for assessing the conditions or these people.

The same protocol guides law enforcers as to how to deal with the homeless, documents showed.

Diverse, colorful

Baguio’s street people are as diverse and as colorful as the homeless living in other cities, said Dulnuan.

One of the oldest street people known to them is a blind man who stays on the sidewalk of Session Road even during heavy rains.

Dulnuan said the man had been seen begging on Session Road for about 45 years. “But [he] is not strictly categorized here as homeless because he actually lives with his relatives and takes a jeepney home when night sets,” she said.

But even the blind man would not be qualified for the CCT. “He is not married,” Dulnuan said.

She said about 20 people sleep in the streets and parks here but “good detective work and patient interaction” helped social workers bring that figure down this month to 15.

Rejected

Many of these people have been rejected by family members or have wandered into Baguio from other provinces, DSWD records showed.

A woman, with whom social workers tried to interact for months, turned out to be a resident of Cebu City who was reported missing.

“She refused to speak. But one time, she spoke in Cebuano, so we painstakingly dug through records and coordinated with Cebu officials until we were able to contact her family. She is back in Cebu today,” Dulnuan said.

She said the easiest solution was for the government or a church foundation to set up a shelter and hire social workers and nurses to take care of them.