IT”S a good time to revisit the Pantawid Pamilya Pilipino Program (4Ps) because in the proposed 2016 national budget, the appropriation for the program has been increased to a hefty P62.7 billion. Has the program achieved its purpose of getting the conditions followed by the targeted family beneficiaries?
We might recall that the conditions for the cash transfers consist of an education component, health component and attendance at scheduled family development sessions (FDS).
For education, there must be attendance in day care center/preschool for children 3 to 5 years old; attendance in primary and secondary schools for children 6 to 14 years old; and attendance in primary and secondary schools for children 15 to 18 years old. Here there was 98-percent compliance in the last monitoring period, March to April 2015.
For health, the conditions are that pregnant women and children 0 to 5 years old submit to check-up/immunizations; and submit to deworming for children 6 to 14 years old. Here there was 97-percent compliance for the same monitoring period.
For the FDS there was 95 percent compliance.
Conclusion: Compliance is certainly most satisfactory.
In making an opinion the main figures to note are those summarized by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) in its own Evaluation Report:
“As of June 24, 2015, the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program is being implemented in 144 cities and 1,483 municipalities in 80 provinces, with a total of 4,391,768 active beneficiary households. Of the total number of households, 4,173,391 are covered by the regular Conditional Cash-Transfer (CCT) Program, while 218,377 households are covered by the Modified Conditional Cash-Transfers (MCCT).
The MCCT covers beneficiaries who are not covered by the regular CCT such as homeless street families and IP households in geographically isolated and disadvantaged areas (GIDA). Of the total number of enrolled households, 1,794,897 (40.87 percent) are from Luzon, 1,698,772 (38.68 percent) from Mindanao, and 898,099 (20.45 percent) from Visayas.
“The total cash grant to eligible and compliant Pantawid Pamilya household beneficiaries for period one to three [P1-P3], covering January to June 2015 is P17,752,498,600 Of this amount, P7,947,293,600 is for education grants and P9,805,205,000 is for health grants.”
As a historical background, in 2008 when the CCT program was started under the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration, there were just 289,181 active household beneficiaries. In 2014, this number of active households had grown to 4,391,768 against a target
of 4,436,732.
This target keeps on changing because of the dynamics of household status, i.e., some are deactivated, while others are reactivated. There is a grievance redress system (GRS) followed by the DSWD that addresses complaints on inclusion errors, in order to maintain a clean database of beneficiaries. Because of this monitoring system 48,563 households have been delisted from the program since GRS was adopted in 2009.
In addition, 315,224 households have been deactivated or are pending for validation from the program. There is a continuing “cleansing” process to maintain the integrity of the system.
It should be a matter of curiosity how the large amounts of cash grants (for example, P17.752 million in January to June 2015), is distributed to so many beneficiaries scattered around the country.
The CCT Program uses Land Bank cash cards that in the first half of 2015 disbursed P7.6 million, or 43.35 percent of the total. Over-the-counter payments were done through rural banks (22.21 percent); cooperatives (19.59 percent); and remittance or money transfer (13.37 percent).
According to the World Bank, more than 30 countries have some form of conditional cash transfer program. Progresa launched in Mexico was the first CCT Program, conceptualized and introduced by Santiago Levy, a deputy minister in the Mexican Ministry of Finance from 1994 to 2000. But probably the largest national CCT program is that of Brazil’s Bolsa Familia with a reported reach of 12 million families (March 2012 report), the government spending for this program 2.5 percent of total government expenditure.
Noting this, should the Philippines appropriate more for its own 4Ps? This is one of the direct social interventions to achieve a measure of inclusive sharing and redistribution of wealth, in this case, to really break the cycle of poverty of carefully targeted poor households. You be the judge.
2 comments
It’s only gonna be truly effective if the RH bill will be implemented fully without the obstruction from the CBCP. anything less and it’s just fostering mendicancy.
no to RHbill…..it is not the solution…..