The Arroyo Administration’s Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) gets the needed boost as World Bank grants US$ 405 million loan to support poverty reduction.
The Washington-based lender said that the loan grant will strengthen the capacity of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) as the project implementer and as a social protection agency, finance part of the new conditional cash transfer (CCT) program, and establish a national household targeting system to identify the poor and improve targeting in social protection programs.
The program is focused on the poor families in the various municipalities and provinces of the country and it is the DSWD that chooses the program beneficiaries through the conduct of a survey called the Proxy Means Test that is conducted to determine the poorest of the poor families.
Transfers to some 376,000 households are covered by the World Bank loan, the rest being financed from the Philippine government’s own budget resources. (PIA)
