Insulated from politics

You know a program is successful in this country when politicians are itching to dip their hands into it.

Going by that criterion, the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program or 4Ps, also called the conditional cash transfer program (CCT), continues to be a success.

The CCT has been so successful that it has been expanded to include employment programs, and the government is considering proposals to extend the cash-for-education aspect of the program to high school.

CCT programs have been launched in other countries, with mixed results. The most successful have been those in Brazil and Mexico, where the programs have been sustained through several administrations.

The CCT is one of the programs of the Arroyo administration that President Aquino has maintained. Its implementation was suspended for several months last year, to prevent it from being used for election purposes.

If the multibillion-peso cash handout program escaped being utilized for partisan political purposes in the previous administration, credit should be given to the original chief overseer of the program, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s social welfare and later health secretary Esperanza Cabral, plus the principal supporters of the CCT, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

The World Bank assisted the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) in identifying qualified beneficiaries for the CCT. The WB, which like Washington is supporting global initiatives for good governance, will pull out of the CCT if control is turned over to politicians.

Bert Hofman, who has ended his stint as World Bank country director and left the Philippines over the weekend, is expected to continue keeping an eye on the program from Singapore, in his new capacity as WB regional director for Asia and the Pacific.

In the four years since the CCT was launched, WB officials have been pleased to observe that the program has escaped being used as yet another instrument of patronage politics.

As of Sept. 5 this year, the program has covered over 2.23 million households, out of the targeted 5.2 million, in 79 provinces. Multiply that by four or five individuals per household (eight to 12 is more realistic in impoverished communities with no access to reproductive health care) and you get an idea of how many Filipinos the CCT has reached.

That kind of reach can be enormously tempting for politicians to exploit for personal purposes.

The challenge for the P-Noy administration is to keep the program away from politics.

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During GMA’s time, the program worked well because it was not identified with any particular public official. Cabral kept a low profile and had no political ambitions. The CCT was simply presented as a poverty alleviation program of government, bankrolled by Juan de la Cruz with assistance from the World Bank/ADB.

The National Statistics Office conducted a Food and Income Expenditure Survey in all areas nationwide where 50 percent of the population lived below the poverty line. Using 25 indicators of poverty, about 10 million households were then classified into poor, not so poor, very poor, and not poor. Cabral launched the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction, identifying those qualified for the CCT.

When P-Noy took over, the DSWD started cleaning up the list, putting in place a grievance and redress mechanism to help weed out beneficiaries who have moved out of their homes or who have regular income. Between July 2010 and June this year, over 155,900 beneficiaries were delisted.

Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman expects the original 5.2 million targeted households to be pruned down to 4.6 million by the time the cleanup is finished. But the general goals remain the same: to help keep millions of the poorest children healthy and in school as well as promote maternal health care.

“It’s not a dole-out, it’s an investment in children, to break inter-generational poverty,” Soliman told STAR editors when she briefed us on the CCT at our office Friday night.

These days the DSWD is working on an “exit strategy” as the target beneficiaries start “graduating” from the program.

“We’re working to put ourselves out of a job,” Soliman told us.

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A component of the exit strategy is the provision of self-employment assistance, in the form of seed funds, to CCT beneficiaries.

There is also a guaranteed employment program, through public-private partnerships, with the participation of the departments of agriculture, environment and natural resources, and public works and highways. The Spanish government is providing assistance in Aurora, the Bicol Region and Caraga.

Beneficiaries can work on road repair and maintenance, nurture seedlings for reforestation, or engage in the production of rice, coconut and salt. The aim is not just to reduce poverty but also to build human capacity.

Local governments are validating lists but are not in charge of identifying CCT beneficiaries or handing out cash. It’s a lot of money: from January to June this year, nearly P5.93 billion was released to cover cash grants.

The funds are received by beneficiaries through cash cards, over the counter from DSWD offices, G-Remit payments, or through the Land Bank and rural banks.

This means politicians can’t pose for photos as they hand out money to beneficiaries, or put their names and faces on billboards claiming credit for the program.

Former senator Aquilino Pimentel Jr. has challenged the CCT before the Supreme Court, saying it went against the devolution program and should be handled by local governments. Pimentel was the principal proponent of the Local Government Code.

The Office of the Solicitor General has responded to the court challenge. Soliman won’t speculate on the outcome of the case, although she said the fact that the CCT has a substantial foreign aid component could allow it to be kept out of the hands of politicians.

For the next two months, the DSWD is reviewing the program, which is supported by 122 civil society organizations, and drawing up changes to ensure that the CCT is not used to influence the midterm elections in 2013.

Soliman, a member of the so-called Hyatt 10 and Arroyo’s social welfare chief before Cabral, has had her share of controversies and criticism. But so far, there has been no buzz that Soliman is nurturing political plans, or that she is open to allowing the CCT to be used for partisan purposes, which could spell the doom of the program.

“What is important,” Soliman told us, “is that we are able to insulate the program from bad politics.”

In this land of patronage politics, that will be a continuing struggle.