Effective social development will make ‘ayuda’ irrelevant

Have the conditional cash transfers bred indolence? Answering that can gauge the effect of the centerpiece anti-poverty program of three admins, 2007-2022.

CCTs aim for child nutritional and educational care. Depending on the number of children, the poorest of the poor families receive P500 to P1,400 a month plus free rice. Parents not only must ensure offspring’s school attendance; pregnant and nursing mothers should also have regular checkups at barangay centers.

Critics had warned at the onset that the monthly “ayuda” would lead to sloth. More so if parents are not afforded skills training but come to rely only on CCTs and alms for subsistence. To stave off those concerns, program planners promised parents’ enrollment in courses at the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority. As well, in apprenticeships in local governments, cooperatives and businesses. Was that done?

Small farm owners have been heard to complain about the difficulty of hiring extra hands for planting and harvesting. They used to tap barrio pools of farm workers, kept busy year-round weeding, fertilizing, spraying, threshing, drying, processing and packing. But the CCTs allegedly dis-incentivize farm work. Fathers from CCT-recipient families remain untrained yet no longer work because of the assured monthly cash, hopefully not for liquor. Mothers meanwhile hire themselves out as housemaids in distant cities, coming home only every election week on cash enticements of local politicos.

With no help in the small farm, owners lose interest in planting and just focus on their main jobs as teachers or small traders. Farms become idle. Meantime the question arises: who’s taking care of CCT-beneficiary children?

How widespread such malady is needs study. But one thing is sure, CCTs are not the be-all and end-all of anti-poverty. They must go hand-in-hand with parental skills training, job placements, productivity and values formation. CCTs must also boost family incomes from fishing, planting, backyard poultry and piggery, even odd jobs.

New Social Welfare Sec. Erwin Tulfo announced the “graduation” of 1.3 million households from the CCT program. “They can now stand on their own two feet. They can survive day-to-day and their children have finished school,” he said of the more than 25 percent of the 4.4 million CCT recipients.

It’s good that CCT succeeded on a quarter of the dependents. Tulfo’s task, however, is to make sure that the remaining three-fourths – 3.1 million families – also pull out of forever from the rut of penury.

The natural next target is to prevent any new family to become penurious. Tulfo cannot do that by himself. Other Cabinet members – for agriculture and food, health, basic education, labor and employment, tourism, environment and natural resources, transportation, trade and industry, communications, science and technology – must keep poverty alleviation in mind.

As of latest count, March 2022, 5.8 percent of 45 million working-age Filipinos were unemployed, and 14.9 percent underemployed. That’s 2.6 million warm bodies without work, and 6.7 million short of income. Aside from work attitudes-building, a multi-pronged approach for livelihoods can minimize the need for any more CCTs.

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