by Rene V. Carbayas
ISABELA CITY, Basilan, Jan 8 (PIA) – Governments and societies all over the globe have one in common—i.e., desperately seeking effective measures to alleviate the poor in their own country.
The perennial problem of poverty in society drew many nations to come together to combat this form of social menace that inevitably mushroomed through the years that eventually requires global solution. Each nation tried to pacify this social condition through various means from dole-out to livelihood programs and projects, from providing job opportunities to conditional cash grants, among others.
In the Philippines, perhaps just like in any parts of the world, the complexity of the root cause of poverty has become incomprehensible because of several factors that must be considered to zero-in to a culprit and thereby address the problem. But it seems impossible.
Some Philippine sectors would point to corruption as the culprit—considered even to be a cancer of the society, seemingly incurable. In this case, like any deadly modern medical diseases, the quest for a cure remains an ongoing search.
Others would blame the elites for owning much of the wealth of the country which left only about 30% that must be shared by some 70% of the population where most of them are poor in the Philippines.
When Benigno “Noynoy” Simeon Aquino III became president in 2010, he promised to curb corruption hoping to improve the lives of most Filipino’s poor. His administration, moreover, has adopted the previous administration’s poverty alleviation program, particularly the “Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program” or referred to as the 4Ps. This was the flagship anti-poverty program of the former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo during her dwindling years as president with Corazon “Dinky” Soliman as Social Welfare Secretary.
Early on, critics grew wary over 4Ps’ viability and capacity to alleviate many Filipinos’ poor. Some tagged the program as dole-out, thereby providing little, temporary, and short-lived impact in alleviating the poor. DSWD officials, however, say it’s not a dole-out because of certain conditions that beneficiaries must undertake in exchange for the assistance given.
Thus, questions lurk, is the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) of the Programang Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino (4Ps) the answer to government’s long desire to alleviate the poor in the Philippines? That is, will the program encourage the poor to be more self-reliant or further become dependent? What are the gains and possibilities of the program towards poverty reduction in the Philippines?
Social exchange: dependency and sustainability
Humans by nature are social beings. We learn out of our interactions with fellow human beings and the environment where we belong. It is supposed to be a dynamic interaction between persons, complementing each other’s needs, more particularly in terms of material needs, like food, clothing, shelter, etc., with specific sectors producing such needs. This is a natural interdependency involving economics that man lives by to affect stability and survival. “No man is an island” indeed. We buy and sell goods and services. There is a continuous exchange of activities.
According to social psychological and sociological perspective the social exchange theory explains social change and stability as a process of negotiated exchanges between parties. Social exchange theory posits that all human relationships are formed by the use of a subjective cost-benefit analysis and the comparison of alternatives. The theory has roots in economics, psychology and sociology.
This is the very same principle that the Philippines 4Ps is anchored on. It is based on reciprocity—“I give, but you also give.”
The 4Ps: Towards poverty reduction in the Philippines?
The “Programang Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino” is a social development and poverty reduction strategy of the Philippine national government that provides conditional cash grants to poor and to extremely poor households in order to improve their health, nutrition and education. Conceptualized in 2006, the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) with technical assistance from the World Bank started implementing the National Sector Support for Social Welfare Development Project (NSS-SWDP) and eventually changing the name to its present title to broaden its scope, components and perspectives.
According to the DSWD, the sole government agency that has oversight on the program, it has dual objectives, which are social assistance and social development. Social assistance would mean providing cash assistance to the poor in order to alleviate their immediate need or in other words, providing a short-term poverty alleviation system, while social development is a process of breaking the intergenerational poverty cycle through investments in human capital .
Also, the program is said to help in fulfilling the country’s commitments in meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). In a study conducted by the United Nations (UN), the overall probability of attaining the targets remain high but dependent largely on the “interaction” of several factors such as leveling-up of current efforts on all target areas, efficient use of allocated and limited resources, additional resources, strong advocacy and the capability to implement the MDGs at the local level.
Cost, benefit, outcome
The social exchange theory, also called the communication theory of social exchange, suggests that human beings make social decisions based on perceived costs and benefits. This hypothesis asserts that people evaluate all social relationships to determine the benefits they will get out of them. This is the comparison level where individuals assess the gains in maintaining such social relationship. It also suggests that someone will typically leave a relationship if he or she perceives that the effort, or cost, of it outweighs any perceived advantages. In the 4Ps, however, the implementers do make or break the relationship.
The 4Ps has been implemented since January 2008. It has become nationwide after going through a piloted program mode between June to December 2007. In 2010 it is estimated that around 300,000 households were targeted under the program, which aims to provide money to extreme poor households in order to allow the family members to meet certain human development goals set by the government. In the Philippines, studies have found a strong correlation between low schooling and high malnutrition and poverty. In its conception until the re-running of the program, the main objectives of the 4P’s remains the same, they are to increase enrollment/attendance of children at the elementary level and reducing poverty.
According to the program, the poorest households with children 6–14 years of age would qualify for the education cash grants, provided that the children are enrolled in schools and regularly attend classes. The minimum rate of school attendance is 85% and schools are supposed to report the attendance rate of program beneficiaries to the respective municipal governments (in cooperation with the Department of Education – Division of City Schools) The monthly benefit is 300 pesos per child attending school for 10 months, up to a maximum of three children per household.
As of 19 July 2011, Pantawid Pamilya has registered a total of 2,212,055 household beneficiaries (see Table 1). The total number of registered households increased by 38.57% or 615,735 households from the 1,596,320 households registered as of the first quarter.
Table 1: Household Coverage per Set (as of 19 July 2011)
Set | Target Households | Number of Registered Households | Percentage (Target vs Actual) |
1 (2008) | 336,208 | 340,116 | 101.16% |
2 (2009) | 288,200 | 289,486 | 100.45% |
3 (2010) | 411,023 | 417,663 | 101.62% |
4 (2011) | 1,303,810 | 1,164,790 | 89.34% |
Total | 2,339,241 | 2,212,055 | 94.56% |
Source: DSWD 4Ps Second Quarter Report 2011
Almost half of the total registered household beneficiaries or around 48% are from Mindanao while 30% and 22% are from Luzon and Visayas, respectively.
Moreover, cash transfers are generally entrusted to the most responsible adult person in the household (normally the mothers or parents), and are credited to the cash card facility of the Land Bank of the Philippines. In the experience of the Bolsa Escola (now Bolsa Familia) in Brazil, the presence of banking facilities such as cash cards greatly facilitates the monitoring of the whole program.
Aside from the education component, the program also has a health component. Under the said component, the selected households are given cash grants provided that: 1) pregnant women must get prenatal care starting from the first trimester and get postnatal care thereafter; 2) child birth is attended by a skilled/trained professional (such as midwives); 3) parents/guardians must attend family planning sessions, parent effectiveness service, and other services; and lastly 5) children under 5 years old must get regular preventive health check-ups and vaccination. The health package provides a beneficiary household P6000 per year.
Comparison level, satisfaction, dependence
A study noted that one heavy criticism of the CCT program is the perception that it is created for vote buying especially the poor voting population. This allegation was based on the fact that local government officials, particularly those in the barangays participated in the identification of the poor in his area, especially during the enumeration stage of the program through the proxy mean test (PMT) of the National Housing Targeting System (NHTS). No doubt, the CCT program will help any incumbent politician (from President down to barangay officials) to secure votes to win if he/she would run for re-election. In the case of Brazil, President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, after assuming office in 2003, expanded the country’s CCT program to become a social safety net program. Da Silva was re-elected largely because of the Bolsa Familia Program, apparently his flagship poverty alleviation program. If given the chance and without term limits perhaps, former President Gloria Arroyo could have won, too. Maybe Aquino III’s term could also be extended.
But setting political apprehensions aside, the study further posed a question whether conditional cash transfer programs really and effectively help the poor break away from the so-called cycle of poverty/ intergenerational poverty?
The study further noted yet another recurring criticism of the program that it discourages the search for employment and eventually would encourage laziness among the poor people. Under this premise, many people would give up trying to find a job, content to live on the program, which, in the experience of the Bolsa Familia, is called the cesta esmola (alms-basket). The National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (NCBB), a powerful arm of the Catholic Church, maintains that “the program is addictive,” and leads its beneficiaries to an “eternal accommodation.” This is what the Philippines hopes not to happen. That is why the DSWD continuous to evaluate the program and conducts consultations to various sectors to effectively implement the program and achieve its goal of reducing poverty in the Philippines.
According to the Katipunan ng Damayang Mahihirap (KADAMAY), an urban poor group, the 4Ps is a “deceitful program” since our government even has to borrow $400 million from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to fund the program. As the government is already burdened with paying its current debt, acquiring additional debts will be more harmful to the country in the long run. Also, besides failing to address the real causes of poverty, the 4Ps as presently construed is sorely insufficient.
The study also pointed out that compared with CCT experience of Brazil and Mexico which have one-fourth (1/4) and one-fifth (1/5) of their households under their respective CCT programs, the 4Ps covers only a mere one million (although now it claims to have two million) out of 18 million households. It said that even if the DSWD achieves its 2.3 million target household by 2011, it still represents about one-eighth (1/8) of total households. Its impact is very minimal and will not make a dent in poverty.
Raising dependents towards social development
For Hartley Dean (2006), social policy is, above all, about the study of human well-being. For Dean, well-being is preferred to ‘welfare’ ‘because well-being is about how well people are, not how well they do (which strictly speaking is what welfare means)’. The notion of well-being is a good place to start because, as Dean suggests, social policies are indeed not only about material goods and services, be these forms of income support, health services or education. They are also about how these goods and services contribute to the quality of life experienced by individuals and families and how ‘quality of life’ and other concepts such as ‘need’, ‘want’, ‘equality’ and so on are understood both across time and in different economic, social, cultural and political contexts.
In this way, ‘social policy’ is both about quality of life and human security (including feelings of happiness and well-being) and the ideological and philosophical issues that these concepts inevitably address, as well as being concerned with how the goods and services that contribute to that quality of life are organized and delivered by governments, private and voluntary agencies, and informal care givers in different welfare systems.
The DSWD stressed that the 4Ps is a stimulus package for the poor intended as social investment rather than plain cash assistance, i.e. dole-out. As mentioned earlier, cash assistance is given to qualified families provided that the family complies primarily with the conditions set for health and education.
Therefore, the 4Ps is not seen as the sole solution to poverty reduction, but the program should be seen on its ability to bring back poor children to get better education and a healthy life to gain dignity and prepare them for their future.
Barely three years since it started in 2008, perhaps is it too early to conclude whether the program is impacting the Filipinos’ poor to raise them from being dependent to becoming more and more self-supporting. Early implementers would attest some significant changes in the social well-being of most poor beneficiaries. Program implementers of the 4Ps in Zamboanga Sibugay observed some social changes among the beneficiaries. The poor began to value and appreciate the use of technology with ATM cards where moneys are disbursed and withdrawn. This, aside from feeling the impact of the program into their lives with some degree of economic gains, understandably because of the cash grants given; the poor slowly value the need to comply with the conditions set.
Program implementers agree that there was a bit of deception at the first stages of implementation, saying that some beneficiaries would tend to resort to short cuts, such as cheating on the true attendance of their children in school or occasionally make alibis for failing to attend to meetings and training. Some would even ask school principals to sign papers even if their kids do not regularly attend school.
The social exchange theory uses economic terms such as benefit, gain, cost, and payment to describe social situations. According to this supposition, people consciously and unconsciously evaluate every social situation in terms of what they will have to put into it, and relate this to the benefits they think they may get out of it. The greater the potential benefit, the greater the personal investment an individual may make in a relationship.
In the case of Filipino beneficiaries, however, monetary benefits were rarely put in question, as long as the family gets a share of the country’s coffer through the program. The poor would be satisfied. Even those who are earning enough would even try to fit themselves into the program to benefit and get additional monetary assistance for free without much hard work, to the detriment of those deserving to be included.
This type of social exchange is considered by many psychologists to be highly individualistic, which means that it assumes that the individual assesses all human social interactions based on his or her personal gain. This supposition denies the existence of true altruism.
According to social exchange theory, people make these decisions based on their individual satisfaction level within the relationship. Individuals typically have a high level of happiness if they perceive that they are receiving more than they are giving to a relationship. If, on the other hand, individuals feel that they are giving more than they are receiving, they may decide that the connection is not fulfilling their needs. However, under the 4Ps this rarely happens. Beneficiaries would tend to make do on what was given. On the part of the DSWD, however, the agency is removing those who were discovered not qualified in the program.
According to the social exchange theory, people will only be generous if they expect some personal benefit to come to them because of it; thus, the conditions set for 4Ps beneficiaries. Examples of personal gain from self-sacrifice can include a show of gratitude from the recipient or the approval of the donor’s peer group. This idea emphasizes the anticipated return for such good deeds, also called reciprocity, as expressed in the phrase, I’ll scratch your back, and you’ll scratch mine.
This is precisely why there is a reason to believe that the 4Ps could still be used by politicians for their political gains. The Aquino III’s administration, however, promised to be different—to journey on towards the right and straight path (Matuwid na Landas).
The Philippines’ 4Ps Conditional Cash Transfer has potentials that may uplift the poor in the long run. But it requires political will, vigilance, and full participation and cooperation of stakeholders, especially the beneficiaries. The beneficiaries are themselves the key result indicator of the success of the program.
As they say, it is always depending on dependents. “Nasa pagsisikap pa rin ang ginhawang matatamasa sa buhay” (Prosperity in life can only be achieved through dedication and hard work). (PIA9-ZBST)
