4Ps Aids 85,000 Families in Bikol

LEGAZPI CITY, Dec. 13  – The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has so far placed 85,395 poor families in Bikol under the coverage of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), a multi-billion peso poverty reduction program of the government, since its inception two years ago.

Next year, over 200,000 more families are being targeted for coverage by the program now named Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) whose nationwide implementation was given a P21-billion appropriation under the government’s 2011 national budget, Remia Tapispisan, the regional director of the DSWD for Bikol on Monday said.

“This target may be still a small figure compared to the total number of families in the region that are considered poor but reducing poverty by that number will already create a good impact,” the DSWD regional chief said.

Based on the 2007 figures of the National Census and Statistics (NCSO), Bikol had a population of over 5.1 million divided among 1.024 million households, 422,278 of them representing 2.6 million or over half of the total number of regional population classified as poor.

The National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) said that Bikol is the second poorest among the 16 regions of the country.

A recent report of the News Service of the Philippine Information Agency regional office here said that since the beginning of its implementation in August 2008, the 4Ps had already covered 59 municipalities or 571 barangays of Bikol.

The 85,395 families that benefited from the 4Ps in Bikol are in the provinces of Albay with 11,869 families; Camarines Sur, 9,078; Masbate, 52,309; Camarines Norte, 2,026; Catanduanes 1,387 and; Sorsogon, 8,726, it said.

This scope of coverage it said will certainly be expanded next year with the approval of the P21 billion budget for the program now being one of the center piece programs of the administration of President Benigno Aquino III.

Tapispisan said that the 4Ps has so far paid out a total of P717,855,762.00 to Bikolano beneficiaries as of September 30, this year.

Each beneficiary family that complied with the requirements set by the program received a maximum of P21,000 in yearly cash assistance representing P6,000 a year or P500 per month for health and nutrition and P3,000 for one school year of 10 months or P300 per month per child for a maximum of three children or a total of P1,400 per month or P15,000 yearly.

The 4Ps beneficiaries are the poorest families identified through the use of the Eligibility Check (EC), a statistical formula that estimates household income through the use of proxy variables indicated in the household survey forms, Tapispisan said.