A new list of poor Filipino families in the country has been released by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) on Monday.
The DSWD said this list contains “potential” Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) beneficiaries.
Not all families included in the list—the Listahanan 3” or the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction—will be included in the 4Ps program, DSWD Secretary Erwin Tulfo said.
In a GMA News report, Tulfo said: “I will just clarify that we will choose from this list the replacement for the 1.3 million beneficiaries that were removed from the 4Ps program. We will not include them right away because we have to submit them to 4Ps, so there is a process.
Tulfo earlier said some two million Filipino families have been put on the wait list for the 4Ps program.
Tulfo said that out of the 4.4 million families, 1.3 million beneficiaries will be removed from 4Ps because they are no longer qualified, or have already reached the maximum seven years of stay in the program.
But he said t these families would not be kicked out of the program immediately, and would be notified weeks before being delisted.
National Household Targeting Office (NHTO) Director Andrew Ambubuyog said their office started visitations of potential beneficiaries for Listahanan 3 during the fourth quarter of 2019, GMA News reported.
The list was finalized in December 2021. Ambubuyog said the final results of their survey showed that 5,599,091 poor families were listed in the DSWD’s database.
“The result of our Listahanan as of December 2021 showed that we have 5,599,091 poor households in the country currently listed in the DSWD’s database or Listahanan,” Ambubuyog, quoted in the GMA News report, said.
The DSWD reported that the regions with the most potential beneficiaries are the Bicol Region with 541,000, Western Visayas with 536,000, and Bangsamoro with 509,000.
Ambubuyog said the regions with the most number of poor households without access to clean water are Bangsamoro at 58 percent, Cordillera at 44 percent, and Western Visayas at 43 percent.