With targets fixed on ending hunger, the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) committee to boost the Walang Gutom Program (WGP) with an additional 300,000 beneficiaries within the year, and an additional 150,000 food-poor families next year.
Undersecretary Eduardo Punay of the DSWD’s Innovations and Programs Development Group (IPDG) said the WGP’s scale up means that all 750,000 identified food-poor families will be benefiting from the program by next year.
Punay said they initially targeted one million household beneficiaries when President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. released an executive order to implement the program, based on the 2021 food insecurity survey of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).
“But in 2023, PSA updated its data, after two years and it was released just last year and it decreased to around 750,000 food poor families in our country so we adjusted the target,” the DSWD official added.
Punay emphasized that officials of local government units (LGUs) have no hand in the selection of WGP beneficiaries.
“This Food Stamp Program, it’s targeted, very targeted. The ones included there are only those identified as food poor. Right now, from the database of poor families of the DSWD, the Listahanan 3, that’s where the beneficiary comes from. These are not endorsed by the mayors, by the local governments,” he explained.
In his fourth State of the Nation Address (SONA) last Monday (July 28), President Marcos announced his directive to increase the WGP beneficiaries, eventually covering all food-poor households and end hunger by 2028.
Presently, the program is implemented in 22 provinces across 10 regions.
The subsequent list of beneficiaries will be based on the list of food-poor from the Community Based Monitoring System (CBMS) of the PSA.
Under the WGP, the beneficiaries receive Php3,000 food credits provided through the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards. A unique feature of the program, the food credits in the EBT cards are intended to purchase nutritious food items and are non-convertible to cash.
The beneficiaries of the WGP are required to attend nutrition education sessions (NES) to learn about health and nutrition, as well as productivity enhancement sessions aimed at upskilling them for possible livelihood opportunities.
In its second year, the WGP has already shown its positive effects in responding to the hunger concerns of the 300,000 pilot beneficiaries.
A Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey commissioned by Globe Telecom showed that among WGP program beneficiaries, the share of households experiencing ‘moderate’ hunger dropped by 4.1 percentage points —from 48.7 percent in October 2024 to 44.6 percent in December.
Punay emphasized that the WGP implementation, similar to the other development programs of the DSWD,, employs the whole-of-government approach to provide a comprehensive intervention to the food poor families.
