MANILA, Philippines - Some family-beneficiaries of the conditional cash transfer (CCT) program are expected to have improved living conditions, moving up from being poor to “near poor.”
“Near poor” is a new classification of families crafted by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), implementing agency of the national government’s CCT program.
Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman said near-poor will be classified as families that fall 10 percent above the poverty line, which differs from area to area based on 25 variables the agency measures.
“These include measures for food, health, access to electricity… We put weights on these metrics and then we gauge them using a set poverty line for each area,” Soliman said.
The present list of beneficiaries, drawn from the National Household Targeting System, is being evaluated to see if there are families that managed to “move up a little higher” from the poverty line. Soliman said the DSWD hopes to come up with a new list of families by the first week of October.
Families classified as near poor will no longer be part of the present CCT program but may become part of a new one.
“We are coming up with this new classification called near-poor. The programs under this are still being developed but obviously, we will consider the major vulnerabilities of any family, which are education, health and job security,” Soliman said.
“We will come up with a framework that will involve social protection and welfare for this particular set of people,” she added.
The DSWD is looking at “synergizing” existing social protection and welfare programs of the government. Soliman said partnering with the private sector is also an option, but this will be for a longer term objective.
“We have community work and maintenance with the Department of Public Works and Highways. With the Department of Agriculture, we have the provision of actual common service facilities like mills and fishing boats. All these are joint efforts with different sectors,” she said.
“In the long run, we hope to have a convergence of different state agency programs and eventually the assistance of the private sector,” she added.
Under the current CCT program, 4.4 million indigent families are receiving monthly allowance from the government, provided that children in the family-beneficiaries are going to school 80 percent of school days and pregnant mothers are given maternal care.
Beneficiaries receive P500 for social and health costs and P300 for education costs. The CCT program covers a maximum of three children per family for a maximum monthly stipend of P1,400.
World Bank: CCT fastest expanding social program
The World Bank said yesterday the CCT program is one of the biggest and fastest expanding social safety net programs in the world that helped reduced poverty rates by 1.4 percentage points.
“It reached this level at a very fast pace no other countries have ever achieved,” WB lead economist Ruslan Yemtsov said in a briefing.
The findings were contained on the WB’s State of Social Safety Nets report released in June. It was the report’s second edition and the Manila briefing was the first in developing markets being conducted by the multilateral organization.
The Washington-based lender assists the CCT with a total of $502 million in loans from 2010 to 2015.
Since 2007, Yemtsov said there are evidence that the CCT program has increased the poor’s standard of living, citing for instance the increasing enrolment rates, live births and enhanced food security for those covered.
“It’s not just increasing their purchasing power, it’s changing (people’s) way of thinking about their future. If they have a constant and predictable source of income that is not affected by politics, people change their decision making, which allow them to make investments and create household economies,” he explained. – With Kathleen Martin