BAGUIO CITY – At least P1.9 billion was earmarked by the national government to bankroll the conduct of another round of survey to be spearheaded by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) in order to ascertain the real number of poor Filipinos who need to be given assistance by concerned government agencies, Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman said here Monday.
Soliman said around 15 million Filipinos are set to be surveyed next year to ascertain their status in life whether, poor, near poor or non-poor in order for concerned government agencies to be able to craft appropriate strategies that would allow them to be resilient in life.
“We want to take a second look on the living condition of our people. We want to ascertain the real number of people who really need direct and indirect assistance from the government,” Soliman stressed.
She added the number of Filipinos to be surveyed will include the 10 million Filipinos who were earlier assessed under the national household targeting system (NHTS) that paved the way for the implementation of the conditional cash transfer (CCT) which has now covered around 4.4 million poor Filipino families.
According to her, the resiliency of the beneficiaries of the conditional cash transfer were already in place through the CCT, the sustainable livelihood program (SLP) and the National Community Driver Development Program (NCCDP), thus, what needs to be established will be the resiliency of those who will be identified in the near poor category.
Secretary Soliman explained near poor families are those families whose income level is around 10 percent above the poverty line and who are also in need of appropriate interventions so that they will be able to cope with the expected negative effects of disasters among others to their sources of livelihood.
She added the program is expected to be rolled out by next month in the form of trainings for the surveyors. The survey proper will be done by February and the initial results of the survey will be released by June in order for the agency to determine the necessary interventions that will be put in place to assist the near poor families to become resilient.
The DSWD official pointed out the survey will be information technology-based so that those poor and near poor families in the remotest villages in the country will be able to be recorded unlike in the previous NHTS whereby the actual number of poor families were not recorded since the surveyors relied on data from the barangay officials which are most of the time not accurate.
Soliman cited the agency is now on the process of purchasing the tablets to be used by the validators so that the second round of validation survey will be done accurately and that the data to be obtained will be reflective of the true picture of poverty in the country for the formulation of added programs and projects that will help improve their living condition.
Secretary Soliman called on concerned local officials to extend utmost support to the members of the validation teams that will be deployed in their areas so that they will not encounter problems in gathering accurate data because of the lack of support of barangay officials to the implementation of the program primarily geared towards addressing poverty in the countryside. By Dexter A. See
