The World Bank said Friday it has approved a $300 million (about P15.381 billion) loan to provide additional funding for the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program, a conditional cash transfer program that benefits 4.2-million poor families.
“This additional financing shows the World Bank’s continuing commitment to the country’s social protection program as it grows with greater sophistication to tackle a broader array of development concerns, including child malnutrition,” Mara Warwick, World Bank country director for Brunei, Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand, said in a statement.
The new funding will finance cash transfers to poor families for a period of two years as well as help combat malnutrition and promote early childhood development. It will also provide technical assistance to the Philippine government to help strengthen implementation and impact, including more efficient payment systems, monitoring and evaluation, and family development sessions.
The 4Ps provides cash grants to poor families to ensure that children stay healthy and in school, thus reducing school dropout rates, discouraging child labor, and enabling them to break free from poverty in adulthood.
Pregnant mothers receiving grants are required to get pre- and post-natal checks to help ensure safe motherhood. Parents attend “family development sessions” where they strengthen their knowledge of child care and are empowered to demand better and expanded social services from the government.
The World Bank has been supporting 4Ps over the last decade. In 2016, the World Bank approved $450 million in funding to help finance the health and education grants for conditional cash transfer beneficiaries from 2016 to 2019, covering about 7 percent of the total cost of the program’s implementation.
Warwick said since 2008, the 4Ps has promoted safer birth deliveries and has improved poor children’s access to educational and health services.
“We are proud to support programs such as this that help millions of families overcome poverty,” she said.
Implemented in 145 cities and 1,483 municipalities in the country, the 4Ps is responsible for a quarter of total poverty reduction, according to the World Bank 2018 Poverty Assessment.
Other achievements include: a 4.9-percent increase in enrollment among children 12-17 years old from a baseline of 80.4 percent; a 10-percent increase in enrollment among children 16-17 years old from a baseline of 60.8 percent; 30-percent reduction in the enrollment gap between boys and girls ages 6-14; and increased access by poor women to maternal and child health services such as antenatal care.
Of the total number of active beneficiary households, 41 percent are from Luzon, 21 percent from Visayas, and 38 percent from Mindanao, with the largest number of beneficiaries coming from the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).
Around 15 percent of the beneficiaries are members of indigenous communities.
Recently, President Rodrigo Duterte signed Republic Act 11310, institutionalizing the 4Ps and providing higher cash subsidies for all beneficiaries. The law aims to “break the intergenerational cycle of poverty through investment in human capital and improvement of delivery of basic services to the poor, particularly education, health and nutrition.”
The annual budget for the 4Ps is $1.7 billion. The additional funding from the World Bank will cover 9 percent of the 4Ps budget through June 2022.