THE government has been helping poor Filipinos free themselves from poverty, using the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program also known as 4Ps. This conditional cash transfer program has been going on for at least a dozen years, and every time the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) defends its annual budget, some senators are still calling out the department urging it to submit a report of the program’s accomplishments in real terms: how many beneficiaries have been successfully rescued from poverty, year after year?
It is not enough for the government to continue distributing dole-outs without a formal assessment or study on how its assistance programs are impacting on their target clientele. All DSWD social welfare programs should be periodically reviewed to assess their effectiveness in realizing their avowed goals.
In the case of the government’s Social Amelioration Program in response to the economic dislocation of the citizenry due to the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020, it is noteworthy that the World Bank itself conducted a study on the impact, gains, strong points and weaknesses of its implementation.
The US-based World Bank said the Philippine government’s emergency assistance during the height of the pandemic has prevented 1.8 million Filipinos from further bloating the nation’s poverty statistics.
‘The World Bank study should serve as a worthwhile guide for policymakers in the Ferdinand Marcos Jr. administration because it validates the true damage the COVID-19 pandemic had caused the Philippine economy…’
The World Bank report, “Crisis and Recovery: Learning from COVID-19 Economic Impacts and Policy Responses in East Asia,” released in Washington on July 12, cited the Philippines, along with Mongolia and Cambodia, as having effective pandemic responses that were able to mitigate the increase in poverty due to the global health crisis.
“Results from a macro-micro simulation model suggest that as a result of the 9.5 percent drop in GDP (gross domestic product) in 2020, the incidence of poverty would have increased to 23.5 percent had the government not implemented emergency COVID assistance measures. Thanks to assistance programs, the incidence of poverty actually declined by 1.6 percentage points, preventing 1.8 million Filipinos from being poor,” the report said.
The premiere financial institution cited the government’s SAP for mitigating the food insecurity of poor Filipinos during the enhanced community quarantine, the country’s most stringent lockdown period. The WB study, however, pointed out that the assistance’s implementation left much to be desired, as there were weak delivery systems, which made beneficiaries queue for many hours during the pandemic to receive cash assistance, and delays in the distribution of SAP.
“The simulation assumes inefficiencies in the targeting of beneficiaries. If targeting had been perfect, the decline in the incidence of poverty would have been 3.2 percentage points in 2020,” it added.
President Rodrigo Duterte, during his time, noticed the same problem of slow delivery of government assistance to the intended beneficiaries. He attributed this to officials’ inability to implement the National Identification System Law which had been approved more than two years before the pandemic. Had there been a working digital list of all citizens, the distribution of “ayuda” would have been swift and seamless, Duterte said then. A Cabinet member in Duterte’s economic team was fired or “allowed to resign” because of this fiasco.
The World Bank study should serve as a worthwhile guide for policymakers in the Ferdinand Marcos Jr. administration because it validates the true damage the COVID-19 pandemic had caused the Philippine economy, citing that the Philippines was hit harder than most countries in Southeast Asia.
