DSWD identifies 5.59 million poorest Pinoy families

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has revealed the results of its Listahanan survey, which identified 5.59 million Filipino families as “poorest of the poor.”

The Listahanan survey is part of the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR), which seeks to locate and identify qualified beneficiaries of the government’s poverty alleviation program.

DSWD Secretary Erwin Tulfo said the database of the country’s poorest families generated by the Listahanan 3 survey would be reviewed, especially the beneficiaries of the flagship poverty alleviation program, the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program or 4Ps.

The DSWD said it has been flooded with requests for inclusion in the conditional cash grants.

“This is just a soft launch. We will have a major launch in the next few weeks,” Tulfo said in a briefing yesterday.

Tulfo said the DSWD would get from the database the replacements for the 1.9 million 4Ps family-beneficiaries that would be delisted from the program.

Of the 1.9 million families to be delisted, 1.3 million graduated from the program for having recovered from being “very poor” to “non-poor.”

The remaining 600,000 family-beneficiaries were found to have violated the program’s conditions like moving out from their declared address.

Tulfo said due process would be observed by the DSWD in delisting and enrolling new beneficiaries.

He said the national household targeting office (NHTO) of the DSWD would work closely with the 4Ps program office in picking families that would be included in the conditional cash transfer benefits.

In his report, Andrew Ambubuyog, chief of the NHTO, said that of the 5.59 million poorest families, 1.23 million are in urban areas. The rest or at least 4.01 million are in rural areas.

The report showed Bicol has the highest number of poorest families with 541,137 followed by Western Visayas with 536,829 and the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao with 509,335 families.