Gov’t agencies urged to back poverty reduction survey

MANILA, Philippines -  National government agencies were asked to back the 2nd National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction survey or “Listahanan” to identify the country’s poorest families eligible for social protection like the conditional cash transfer (CCT). 

Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) Undersecretary Florita Villar discussed the importance of the database to be built from the Listahanan during an orientation forum with national government officials.

Villar said a successful Listahanan will ensure efficient and effective implementation of the DSWD’s anti-poverty programs.

It will also ensure that DSWD programs will cover truly deserving families needing immediate government help, she added.

The Pantawid Pamilya Pilipino Program (4Ps) is one of the biggest programs to extensively use the Listahanan. It has identified four million beneficiaries using the database.

A World Bank study showed  about 90 percent of  beneficiaries of the 4Ps indeed come from the bottom 40 percent of the population.

World Bank economist Rashiel Velarde said the Philippines has a history of well-meaning but poorly targeted programs to assist the poor.

“And this has resulted in huge sums of government resources channeled to the non-poor,” she said. “No doubt these programs are well-meaning. But in the end, what matters is their impact on the lives of the poor.”

Dennis Mapa of the University of the Philippines School of Statistics shed light on how the Listahanan will identify poor families in the second round of assessment through the Proxy Means Test (PMT).

“Being a model, the PMT is not perfect,” he said. “There are possibilities for inclusion or exclusion errors. The challenge is to keep these errors at an acceptable rate.”

The PMT is a statistical model that estimates the income of families based on observable and verifiable household characteristics such as housing features, education and livelihood of the household head, among others.

For the second round of assessment, new features were added to the PMT model to minimize the inclusion and exclusion error rates.

These include two PMT sub-models (one for the National Capital Region and one for all other regions), community variables as determinants of poverty status and a second stage screener to flag possible inclusion errors or non-poor being included in the list of poor.

With these enhancements, the combined inclusion and exclusion error rates declined from 22-35 percent in the old model to 6-19 percent in the new model.

The DSWD said Executive Order 867 issued in 2010 declared national government agencies as the main data users of the Listahanan database of the poor.

They are mandated to use it as basis in identifying the beneficiaries of their programs and services.

Listahanan makes available to these agencies and other implementers of social protection programs a comprehensive socio-economic database of poor families identified through objective and verifiable means.

DSWD Secretary Corazon Soliman earlier said the second Listahanan may be conducted by the end of the year.

The first listing was done in 2009, and the resulting database built and released in 2011.