DSWD warns about impostors 

listing Bohol 4Ps beneficiaries 

TAGBILARAN CITY, Bohol, October 17 (PIA)—The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has warned communities, especially in three of Bohol towns: Carmen, Garcia Hernandez and Anda, be wary about impostors pretending to be from DSWD. 

The DSWD has received reports about individuals roaming around the said towns, doing house to house surveys and allegedly listing applicants to the government’s flagship social protection program in Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps). 

Said individuals have gone to the barangays, listing new beneficiaries, following the government’s screening of the list of beneficiaries, updating such and disqualifying those found to have abused the program. 

Many have believed that this process has significantly reduced the number of beneficiaries and though new slots have been opened. 

In a press statement, DSWD-7 Regional Director Rebecca Geamala, revealed that their office has received reports from the towns about the illegal activity and urges people to be wary and report to such the nearest DSWD City or Municipal Action Team Office. 

She also reminded the public that the DSWD is not collecting fees from anybody, especially in exchange of putting one into the Pantawid list of beneficiaries. 

She also stressed that the system of picking the beneficiaries of the Pantawid, is based on the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction, or more popularly known as Listahanan. 

Listahanan, also known as the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR), is an information management system that identifies who and where the poor are nationwide. 

Listahanan makes available to national government agencies (NGAs), local government units (LGUs), non-government organizations (NGOs), and other stakeholders, a database of poor households as basis in identifying potential beneficiaries of social protection programs and services. 

According to the DSWD’s Listahanan website, a unified set of criteria for identifying the poor would enable convergence and complementation of social protection programs in addressing the different dimensions of poverty. 

This will maximize the impact of social protection programs and, at the same time, minimize waste of resources. 

Through the use of a unified poverty database in the identification of program beneficiaries, the resources of government are better utilized since the right people are identified and assisted. 

This strategy also enables the government to reduce leakage rates in program beneficiary selection. 

DSWD uses the database in targeting beneficiaries for its various programs and services like the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program, Social Pension for Indigent Senior Citizens, Unconditional Cash Transfer Program, and among others. 

Other agencies and organizations may use the database through a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with DSWD. 

In firming up the Listahanan, a data gathering process for the poverty database is through household assessment, which is includes identification of areas to be assessed and the data collection strategy appropriate for areas identified which also updates the Proxy Means Test (PMT) model, the conduct of home visits to collect basic information of household members using the Household Assessment Form (HAF), the validation phase when initial list of poor households is generated and posted in conspicuous places and the report generation and management phase when the list of poor is finalized and shares this to other social protection stakeholders. 

By Proxy Means Test (PMT), data collected and encoded into the system are subjected to a statistical model that rates the welfare level of the households based on observable verifiable proxy indicators of the family’s income such as: materials used in house structure; family’s access to basic services, and facilities like water, and electricity; and, ownership of specific assets, and many others. 

DSWD said the PMT is vital to the project because it identifies the family’s income through non income indicators and comparing them to the official poverty threshold of the provinces hence identifying whether the household is poor or non-poor. 

For the 4Ps, aside from the strict adherence to the Listahanan, those eligible for the program are those families with children from 0-18 years old, or with a pregnant woman during the time that a Listahahan Team made the assessment. 

Furthermore, only those who are willing to undergo and follow the conditionalities of the program as among their responsibilities. 

In 2017 in the entire Central Visayas, the DSWD assessed 1,104,834 households and identified 2,932,322 individuals as poor. 

Of the 534,433 which have been identified as poor households in Central Visayas, 100,691 are from Bohol. (rahc/PIA7/Bohol)