A SENIOR official of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) on Thursday affirmed that some 761,150 households will be retained in the list of Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) beneficiaries.
DSWD Undersecretary for Innovations Edu Punay explained that the list of retained households was the result of a reassessment of beneficiaries in line with the directive of Secretary Rex Gatchalian.
“That means, they will not graduate; they will continue to benefit from the program. Because of the assessment, our department saw that they are still poor and still need assistance under the 4Ps program,” Punay said in a television interview.
“The reason found by the department for this is the impact of the pandemic,” Punay added.
The retained households were part of the 1.1 million households earlier assessed as non-poor under the Listahanan 3 of the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR).
Of the 1.1 million 4Ps members, 339,660 households were assessed as Level 3 or self-sufficient and recommended for graduation or exit from the program.
“What we do here with our graduations, they are endorsed to local government units and we also provide them with various assistance or programs such as the Sustainable Livelihood Program (SLP) to still help them as they exit from the 4Ps program,” Punay explained.
The 4Ps is the government’s national poverty reduction strategy and a human capital investment program that provides conditional cash transfer to qualified household-beneficiaries.
The program as defined by the DSWD is a human development initiative which provides social protection, social assistance, social development, and other complementary support services in partnership with concerned agencies, local government units and other stakeholders toward improving the health and nutrition, education, and socio-economic aspects of the lives of the beneficiaries.