The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) FO IX clarifies withholding of additional beneficiaries on the country’s conditional cash transfer program commonly known as the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program.

This is in response to the volume of queries received by the agency in their social media account. The said withholding of potential beneficiaries follow the directive of President Rodrigo Duterte to improve the management of the program’s system and to focus on uplifting the lives of its current beneficiaries.

DSWD Field Office IX Regional Director, Atty. Araceli F. Solamillo, said that the program aims to ensure the veracity of the beneficiaries’ data encoded in their system.

“We are currently strengthening our monitoring and validation on the current status of our Pantawid beneficiaries. We are encouraging them and the public in general to help us particularly in strengthening our Grievance Redress System (GRS) as this is very helpful in our goal to have an accurate data of our beneficiaries,” Atty. Solamillo said.

The GRS is a component of the Pantawid Pamilya that caters queries on beneficiaries’, provides status and updates, and validates filed complaints and act upon to provide necessary actions.

To date, Pantawid Pamilya has already delisted 280 households from monitoring period December 2017 to June 2018 due to various reasons: 14 of which was due to ineligibility or those households that no longer qualify as per guidelines of the program; on the other hand, majority of the delisted households or a total of 266 households was due to voluntarily waiving their benefits.

The department serves a total of 289,755 household beneficiaries in the entire Region IX under the regular program while 29,578 households are under the Modified Conditional Cash Transfer (MCCT) program for Indigenous Peoples.