Zamboanga City – The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) through the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction, now known as the Listahanan, intensifies its effort to make sure that all beneficiaries of the government’s conditional cash transfer program, otherwise known as the Pantawid Pamilya PilipinoProgram (4P’s) are assessed.

The Regional office enlisted the help of parent leaders throughout the region to list down the names of beneficiaries who were not assessed by the Listahanan in the second round of household assessment. The households who signified are now being visited by the field workers to validate and assess if need be.

In Zamboanga del Sur alone, ranked second highest number of beneficiaries in the entire country, there are total of 140,804 Pantawid household-beneficiaries. It is the Listahanan’s objective to make sure all 140,804 are already in the database hence the need to validate.

Regional Field Coordinator for region 9, Antoniette Maria Lucero said that the directive of the Regional Director is to continue the assessment until all the names on the list are validated.

“Except for those who were already interviewed during the Grievance Redress System (GRS) validation, all Pantawid beneficiaries should be assessed in the second round of household assessment,” Lucero said.

Unassessed beneficiaries may be due to any of the following reasons (1) the beneficiary/respondent lives in an area outside the pre-determined Pockets of Poverty; (2) the beneficiary/respondent was not in their home after being visited by the field enumerators multiple times; (3) they were missed out by the field enumerator.

As of this writing, the Listahanan was already able to assess a total of 559,747 (Pantawid and non-Pantawid beneficiaries included) out of the targeted 688,495 in region 9.

Manwhile, Deputy Regional Program Management Officer-Listahanan, Pilar F. Francisco said they are hoping that beneficiaries would be truthful in answering the assessment questions as the result will be instrumental in the allocation of public resources.

Duplication may also happen during the assessment. This means that a household might have been interviewed twice that could result to double entry in the Listahanan database.

“The household-beneficiary should tell our enumerators whether or not their household was already assessed to avoid duplication as it may create inconsistencies in the data and therefore might affect the result of the assessment. A genuinely poor household may be tagged as non-poor if there are inconsistencies in the Family Assessment Forms,” Francisco said.

Listahanan is an information management system that identifies who and where the poor are in the country. The system makes available to National Government Agencies (NGAs) and other social protection stakeholders a database of poor families as reference in identifying potential beneficiaries of social protection program.###