THE Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has started enrolling 300,000 additional household beneficiaries into the Walang Gutom Program (WGP), a key anti-poverty initiative of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.’s administration.
Undersecretary Edu Punay of the DSWD’s Innovation and Program Development Group (IPDG) announced that the new beneficiaries will complete the 600,000 target households for this year.
“Since last year, we have been able to serve 300,000 household beneficiaries in 10 regions and 22 provinces. The President announced in his State of the Nation Address (SONA) that we will increase it. Now we have onboarded an additional 300,000 beneficiaries,” Punay said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Before the end of the year, we will serve 600,000 in this program—600,000 household beneficiaries in 12 regions and more provinces,” he added.
According to Punay, the expansion was supported by the release of funds under the Asian Development Bank (ADB) loan agreement as part of the Reducing Food Insecurity and Undernutrition with Electronic Vouchers (REFUEL) Project.
“The funding provided by the national government in the General Appropriations Act amounted to P1.9 billion. This is only sufficient to serve 50,000 beneficiaries for one year. Therefore, our economic managers strategized by negotiating and arranging a loan agreement with the ADB,” Punay explained.
The DSWD’s REFUEL project is implemented in partnership with the ADB, Agence Française de Développement (AFD), and the OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID). It aims to assist 750,000 households across 22 provinces.
“This is a program that provides food assistance through food provision and food credits to food poor families throughout the country, who really only eat once or twice a day,” Punay said.
The project will provide these households with P3,000 each in monthly food credits, which can be used to purchase nutritious food items from DSWD-accredited stores.
Punay highlighted the positive outcomes of the Walang Gutom Program (WGP), citing a report by the Social Weather Stations (SWS).
According to the SWS survey, the incidence of hunger among WGP beneficiaries decreased by 7.2 percent within a six-month period from October 2024 to March 2025.
