by Rene V. Carbayas
ISABELA CITY, Basilan, Dec 10 (PIA) – The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has intensified the review and verification of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program beneficiaries to cleanse it of unqualified ones.
Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman said they have already delisted around 162,000 households who were erroneously listed as beneficiaries based on the results of the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR) survey previously conducted by the agency.
In a consultation meeting with the media recently, Soliman admitted that the NHTS-PR still has “inclusion errors” that were committed by enumerators hired by the agency for the survey.
“We’re continually cleaning up our database based on the complaints that we receive through our hotline 0918-9122813 and reports filed in our field offices,” Soliman said.
For the third quarter of the year, she noted that the DSWD processed a total of 1,399 complaints and resolved 404 of them.
“We’ve been getting numerous complaints. Our hotline alone receives an average of 500 text messages on a daily basis and it takes about a month to process them all,” she said.
But overall, Soliman said they consider the results of the survey as satisfactory and that the uncovered inclusion errors were only minimal.
“This is not a perfect system. It has some errors but it’s not at the 20 or 30 percent level. We have delisted less than 10 percent of the beneficiaries so far so I think the system is working quite well,” she added. (PIA9-ZBST)