800,000 4Ps beneficiaries to be delisted

MANILA, Philippines — Around 800,000 people will be removed from the list of beneficiaries of the Pantawid Pamilya Pilipino Program (4Ps) this year, the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) said yesterday.

DSWD officer-in-charge Eduardo Punay said these soon-to-be delisted beneficiaries would be graduating from the conditional cash transfer program after it was seen that their way of living has improved.

“We assess the status of these beneficiaries because there are those whose quality of life has improved, even a little, and they are no longer in poverty. That’s why we monitor them regularly every two years,” he said partly in Filipino during the Dapo Restaurant and Bar News Forum in Quezon City.

Among those included in the delisting are beneficiaries who have been with the program for seven years and whose children have graduated from high school.

Punay said there were 1.3 million 4Ps beneficiaries that were supposed to graduate from the program based on their list in 2019. However, the list became outdated because of the hardships experienced by Filipinos during the COVID-19 pandemic in the past two years, he added.

Based on the DSWD review, 500,000 are still tagged among the poorest of the poor and remain eligible for the program.

Republic Act 11310, which former president Rodrigo Duterte signed in 2019, institutionalizes conditional cash grants to the poorest of the poor in a bid to improve their health and nutrition as well as the education of their children up to 18 years old.

Around 4.4 million are expected to benefit from the program this year.