Government bets big on food stamps, cash handouts: Eradicating poverty in the Philippines
Published on: Friday, December 22, 2023
By: ABS CBN News
Beneficiaries use the electronic benefit transfer cards at the Don Bosco Youth Centre in Tondo, Manila.
MANILA: The Philippine government is betting big on food stamps and cash gifts for poor families in 2024 in an effort to stamp out poverty.A Social Weather Stations survey earlier said 48 percent of Filipino families rated themselves as mahirap or poor, 25 percent said they were not poor, and 27 percent rated placed themselves on the borderline.ADVERTISEMENT
The Marcos administration wants to bring down the poverty incidence in the country to 8.8 to 9 percent by 2028 from 18.1 percent in 2021, the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC) said in June.
Speaker Martin Romualdez said government is allocating P60 billion for the Ayuda sa Kapos ang Kita (AKAP) programme in 2024, which aims to extend cash assistance to poor and low-income families.
Information on the House of Representatives website said the P60 billion programme is targeting 12 million families: with each household earning a monthly income of P23,000 or less receiving a one-time cash aid of P5,000.
Romualdez said he does not foresee any difficulty in implementing AKAP.
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Speaking to ABS-CBN’s TeleRadyo Serbisyo, Social Welfare Assistant Secretary Irene Dumlao said the AKAP programme is a new directive not previously assigned to the DSWD.
“We have to see if we are the sole implementor or if there are other agencies that will implement,” she said, adding that the 12 million “near poor” families could come from the DSWD’s Listahanan or “Talaan ng Mahihirap.”
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Dumlao said DSWD had already identified 300,000 household beneficiaries that should exit the government’s conditional cash transfer programme after reaching economic sufficiency or social adequacy.
Another poverty alleviation programme that has received support from the Marcos administration is the food stamp programme, which gives beneficiaries P3,000 in monthly food credits through an Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card. The money can then be used in purchasing select food commodities from partner merchant stores.
Other social protection programmes receiving backing from government include assistance to individuals in crisis situations, social pension for indigent seniors, KALAHI-CIDSS, disaster response and supplementary feeding programmes and Oplan Pag-abot, which seeks to protect individuals and families living in the streets.
Dumlao said DSWD opened a mega-satellite centre along White Plains Avenue, which applies the appropriate interventions for families living in the streets including temporary shelters or the Balik-Probinsiya programme.
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