Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program - Boon or Bane?

ZAMBOANGA CITY – While the Aquino administration’s Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program or 4Ps continue to provide benefits to the poorest of the poor, others have claimed that red tape and corruption allegations were also hindering the government’s conditional cash grants.

In Zamboanga City, a 33-year old mother of 6 - Flor Fernandez - said she had applied for the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) in March this year and up until now have not receive her membership to the government’s conditional cash grants.

“I went to the barangay office and was told to go the Department of Social Welfare and Development to apply for the 4Ps and I did. But since then, I kept coming back to the office and they just told me to come back again and again and recently was told to wait for their advice,” Fernandez, who is now pregnant on her 7th child, told the regional newspaper Mindanao Examiner.

Fernandez said she was not given any papers or copies of the documents she had signed at the DSWD office. “They just told me to sign and that’s it. I don’t have any copy of anything, not a single document,” she said.

Dennis Balat, a father who works as a utility man for a small company in Zamboanga, said they used to receive P800 monthly from the 4Ps for his child, who is still studying, but the meager money they are receiving is not even enough and worse, the government now has stopped its regular remittance of the financial grant.

“Before we used to get P800 every month from the 4Ps and it went straight to our ATM which was provided by the DSWD, and the worse part here was when the cash grant came every two months and sometimes even longer and now we were told that there are no more ATM withdrawals, but payroll,” he said in a separate interview.

He said other beneficiaries of the 4Ps have resorted to pawning their ATM to unscrupulous individuals who charged as much as 20% interest in advance. “They have to surrender their ATMs to these financiers who then take out as much as 20% from whatever these 4Ps beneficiaries are receiving from the government. It’s a tough world out there, especially if you have nothing, no jobs or any source of income,” Balat said.

The DSWD is the lead agency of the 4Ps - a human development measure of the national government that provides conditional cash grants to the poorest of the poor, to improve the health, nutrition, and the education of children aged 0-18 and is the flagship poverty alleviation program of the Aquino administration.

According to data released by the government, as of June 2015, there are 4,436,732 registered household-beneficiaries, of which 555,861 are indigenous households. The 4Ps has two types of cash grants that are given out to household-beneficiaries – health grant of P500 per household every month and education grant of P300 per child every month for ten months. A household may register a maximum of three children for the program.

For a household with three children, a household may receive P1,400 every month, or a total of P15,000 every year for five years, from the two types of cash grants given to them. These cash grants are distributed to the household-beneficiaries through the Land Bank of the Philippines or through alternate payment schemes such as Globe G-Cash remittance and rural bank transactions.

A total of P17.75 billion cash grants were paid to eligible and compliant beneficiaries for the first to third period of 2015 covering January to June disbursements. From this amount, P7.95 billion was paid for education, and the remaining P9.8 billion was disbursed for health.

In order to receive the subsidies, all the succeeding conditions must be met by the household-beneficiaries - pregnant women must avail pre-natal and post-natal care, and be attended during childbirth by a trained professional; parents or guardians must attend the family development sessions, which include topics on responsible parenting, health, and nutrition; children aged 0-5 must receive regular preventive health check-ups and vaccines; and children aged 6-14 must receive deworming pills twice a year; and children-beneficiaries aged 3-18 must enroll in school, and maintain an attendance of at least 85% of class days every month. (Mindanao Examiner)

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