by Rene V. Carbayas
ISABELA CITY, Basilan, Dec 9 (PIA) – The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has stepped up the registration process of new beneficiaries of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program or 4Ps in the ARMM and other neighboring regions in a bid to meet the program’s target enlistment of 1.3 million additional families for this year.
Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman told media that the agency is working for the inclusion before yearend of around 65,000 more families from the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) and other parts of Mindanao in the national government’s anti-poverty initiative.
She said the additional 4Ps beneficiaries from the ARMM of the conditional cash transfer program will come from areas that were affected by the recent floods and armed conflicts.
“The (registration) lag is mainly in the ARMM but the assemblies and registration for the additional beneficiaries there are presently ongoing and we’re hoping to complete the process within this month or the next,” Soliman said in a consultation with the media on the implementation of the 4Ps.
The DSWD said that it has already enlisted 1,188,576 households as new beneficiaries as of end-October out of its targeted 1,303,810 households for this year.
Since the introduction of 4Ps in 2008, it has so far covered 2,232,839 household-beneficiaries or 95.45 percent of its targeted 2,339,241 households by the end of the year.
Based on the agency’s accomplishment report, Mindanao’s six regions comprised the bulk of the beneficiaries with 1,086,280 or 48.65 percent followed by Luzon with 669,575 households or 29.99 percent and Visayas with 476,984 or 21.36 percent.
4Ps is a poverty reduction and social development strategy of the national government that provides conditional cash grants to extremely poor households to improve their health, nutrition and education particularly of children aged 0-14 years.
It is one of the responses of the Philippine government to the challenge of meeting the Millennium Development Goals.
The program provides beneficiaries cash grants of P500 a month for health and nutrition expenses and P300 a month per child for educational expenses. A household with three qualified children could get P1, 400.00 monthly. (PIA9-ZBST)