DSWD embarks on more reliable system for identifying poor
The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) is working on a reliable information system that will tell who and where the poor households are for more effective pro-poor program delivery.
DSWD 6 Director Teresita Rosales said they are implementing the National Household Targeting System (NHTS) so that the poor in the country can really be served appropriately with programs of the government intended to help them.
Rosales said the NHTS is aimed to unify criteria for the selection of the poorest population, create database of socio-economic variables of households and use the database to identify beneficiaries of social protection programs.
She said the system is also intended to reduce leakage and under coverage or exclusion of poor in the social protection services because of erroneous data.
She said the assessment is done nationwide and will come up with an electronic database that contains the individual files of each poor family in the Philippines, with fingerprints, signature and picture.
Rosales said the whole 134 LGUs in Western Visayas composing of municipalities, Highly Urbanized Cities and component cities is to being assessed, with total saturation for localities with 50 percent and above poverty incidence.
For municipalities with 49 percent and below poverty incidence, the Small Area Estimated or the FIES of the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) will be used.
To date, Rosales said, household assessment is completed in 6 municipalities of Aklan, while it is on-going in four municipalities of Negros Occidental and five in Iloilo, while the remaining areas are set for completion before end of December 2009.
To ensure reliability of data gathering and encoding, area coordinators, area supervisors, enumerators and encoders are trained as well as questionnaires are checked for erroneous entries which the computers will reject if not correctly entered.
Rosales said the long term benefit of this system is that the government’s anti-poverty and poverty mitigation programs are really made to benefit those households who are supposed to, as now being done under the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4 P’s) of President Arroyo.
“The assessment is set for completion before December 2009, so that government resources poured into anti-poverty programs will be effectively benefiting the real poor,” Rosales said. (PIA6/ESS)