CCTs contribution to improved school attendance, enrollment - DSWD Secretary

By Vicente W. Villavert

Thursday 29th of March 2012

ILOILO CITY, March 29 (PIA) - - Secretary Corazon Juliano - Soliman of the Department of Social Welfare and Development said that the implementation of the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) or the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program has contributed to the improvement in poor children’s enrollment and attendance in school.

Secretary Soliman was in Iloilo City to lead in the signing of the Memorandum of Agreement between the DSWD and the local chief executives for the expansion of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) in Western Visayas.

Soliman said that there are two studies being conducted by the Social Weather Station (SWS) on impact evaluation and the result will be released this coming May; the other study is on spot-check on the 4Ps.

“The nationwide spot check where it is also conducted by the SWS was held in areas where the 4Ps is implemented to find out if the program is really benefiting the targeted recipients,” Soliman said.

Soliman noted that the compliance in education has 95 percent accomplishment while the compliance on health is 90 percent and 98 percent for family development session compliance.

The DepEd has also its own study, and they assessed the 2009 drop-out rates comparing the 4Ps and non 4Ps area and “it was found out that the 4Ps area has lower drop-out rate while in the non-4’s area the drop-out rate is still a problem.”

“Merong increase in enrollment sa Pantawid area, gayong sa non-Pantawid area hindi gumalaw ang bilang ng enrollment,” Soliman said.(There was an increase in enrollment in the Pantawid area while there was hardly any movement in the non-Pantawid area.)

The DSWD Secretary was happy to note that, “there was a clear, positive result in the compliance in education and health component of the 4Ps program, “but the comprehensive result of the study will still be known this May.”

She said that there were 2.3 million beneficiaries last year, and as the program expands, “we have already as of March 9 some 3,029,827 households over the country, which translates to about seven million aged 0 to 14 years old, are benefiting from this program.”

“We are covering all regions, 79 provinces except Batanes, 138 cities, and 1,215 municipalities,” Soliman said.

For Western Visayas, the grand total is 261,591 beneficiaries, Soliman said.

The Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) is a priority program of the national government on poverty reduction and social development. It provides conditional cash grants to extremely poor households to improve their health, nutrition, and education aged 0-14 years old.(JCM/VWV-PIA 6, Iloilo)