Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman may have unwittingly put President Aquino’s vaunted plan to reduce the number of poor families via anticorruption measures in a bad light when she said the P21-billion conditional cash-transfer (CCT) program “was ambitious because the number of poor families is growing.” Her statement in Zamboanga City was unfair to the President, since it means that the job-creation program of the administration could not induce economic opportunities that would reduce the number of poor families.
It is no wonder that even Sen. Franklin Drilon, chairman of the finance committee, while “generally supportive” of the Department of Social Welfare and Development dole-out plan, wants proper monitoring of the program, which aims to reduce the number of poor families that Soliman says, “is growing.” Indeed, Soliman’s statement has very serious implications. She may have unwittingly admitted that the administration she now serves is unable to arrest the growing number of poor Filipinos. And, that the President she now serves has no clear strategy to address poverty, except to dole out cash to the growing number of poor families.
Whether deliberate or not, Soliman negates her boss’s assertion that there will be less poor Filipinos under his administration. In a way, Soliman may have said that things are not working as promised. Her statement contradicting her boss’s claims may have been a reckless one, made in haste in a bid to defend the P21-billion taxpayer-funded dole-out project. There is no other way to explain why she wants that huge cash fund to be liberally disbursed to whoever her department may decide is poor. The only way to justify that is to say that there are more poor people today than in the past.
During the budget deliberations, Soliman said she agreed with former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo that the Aquino dole-out scheme was “ambitious”. But what is striking is that the context of the word ambitious under the CCT plan now is that there is no infrastructure support put in place and that the number of poor has ballooned from just 1 million during Arroyo’s time to 2.3 million under Mr. Aquino’s term, a staggering 130- percent increase in so short a time. This could be why Drilon wants transparency about the program, given the amount of public funds involved.
We understand that the P21-billion dole-out scheme is part of an overall poverty-reduction program of the government but the fact remains that the number of its beneficiaries has surged for no reason at all. Under Soliman’s cash dole-out scheme, the selected beneficiaries get an outright grant of P500 a month for every household. No strings attached, no conditions. This is supposedly a “health-and- nutrition grant,” something they can use to buy food. They also get P300 a month for every child as an education grant.
When the dole-outs arrive, are the poor families immediately relieved of their poverty? Or do they become dependents, mendicants to the CCT plan, which one pundit says fosters a culture that frowns on toiling for one’s dignity and earning honest jobs. There is so much lack of logic in the Soliman dole-out scheme that is supposed to clear the beggars from the streets and give them training programs so that they become responsible citizens. Beyond the varying degrees of tint on her hair, Soliman has to help us understand how our poor countrymen could get themselves out of poverty when they seem to be actually making money out of being poor.
Under the plan, a poor family with just one child would get P800 a month. Sure, that is not a big amount. But that is money you cannot just pick up from the street. To these poor families, P800 would still be manna from heaven. Unfortunately, there are people who would actually prefer to live on manna forever. What happens when Soliman’s P21-billion dole-out fund is exhausted? Would the “poor” be eventually moved out of poverty? Or would they still be there waiting for Congress to approve and allocate another P21 billion in cash dole-outs to perpetuate Soliman’s scheme?
If that is so, what happens to the vow of the President to reduce poverty incidence. Does Soliman really understand the “poor” and how they think? In the end, Soliman should come up with forthright answers that we can all understand. She should help us see the connection between cash dole-outs to the poor and reducing poverty. She should address the concern of taxpayers that her dole-out scheme is merely a way of making some people’s state of poverty just a little bit “more comfortable”.
These are valid concerns, and Soliman and her boss should not take it against us and the Filipino taxpayer for asking these questions.
Seedfinance program for poor
In marked contrast to Soliman’s promotion of mendicancy is that of the ongoing plan of Seedfinance Corp., a microfinance advocate, that is making inroads in the fight against poverty. We attended a strategy meeting in Cebu last week of Seedfinance and its partners, which include rural banks, microfinance firms, cooperatives and foreign nongovernment organizations, and we cannot but feel proud about the way they empower the poor, so unlike the dole-out mentality that Soliman fosters. Under the Seedfinance concept, they fund the programs of rural banks, co-ops and microfinance that are meant to help the poor.
According to Carlos Ani, Seedfinance chairman, the firm is a microfinance lender that aims primarily to bring the benefits of microfinance to microenterprises, self-employed workers, family-based and community-based food production and other livelihood activities through the extension of financial, technical and business-development facilities to workers’ associations, cooperatives, rural banks, microfinance nongovernment organizations, people’s organizations, and commercial, industrial and agricultural enterprises, corporations, partnerships and proprietorships.
Seedfinance has already partnered with providers of services and other concerns of the small and medium enterprises with a view to ensuring that they get cost-efficient infrastructure support. The company has partnered with Encash, a deployer of ATM units, so that rural banks and co-ops can service the needs of their customers. The Encash ATMs are linking to Megalink, Bancnet and Expressnet allowing for synergy in the tie-up between the two entities. Also, during the Cebu conference at Crown Regency Residences, providers of microinsurance, which include the Philippine partner of Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurers, unveiled a microinsurance plan to protect the clients of rural banks, co-ops and other microfinance institutions from possible losses arising from typhoons and other natural calamities.
During the conference, Encash president Eric Severino voiced the possibility of making rural banks and co-ops have the capability to issue ATM cards to their own clients through the Seedfinance-Encash tie-up. The opportunities for empowering the poor through this include less fees for remittances for families of overseas Filipino workers, as well as lower transaction costs for the poor families. Severino said there is now a pilot program being tested in Bicol that would allow the propoor institutions to have interlinked transactions sans the exorbitant costs associated with the need for the software. In short, there is outsourcing available for the required banking services for the entities under the Seedfinance-Encash tie-up.
Dubbed the “Hosted Core Banking Service,” the program would allow for an automation of banking services without need for paying up-front the software license fees, plus there is no longer any need for competency issues and skills required to run the new technologies. These trailblazing concepts of Seedfinance are what Soliman and company should attempt to foster in the country to address the poverty- alleviation issues. We are pretty sure that if Soliman plunks even just P1 billion to Seedfinance and Encash from out of her budget for the CCTs, the number of the poor families will drastically be cut with their self-worth intact and their productivity assured. But then, Soliman has her priorities, no matter how skewed they may be.
E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
