• GILBERT P. BAYORAN
A total of 15,311 households in Negros Occidental, including the highly- urbanized Bacolod City, have been reactivated to the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s (DSWD) Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps).
This was after Social Welfare Secretary Rex Gatchalian ordered the reassessment of 4Ps program, which focused on beneficiaries who were tagged as “non-poor”, using the Social Welfare and Development Indicator (SWDI) tool.
In a press briefing yesterday in Talilsay City, Belen Gebusion, DSWD-Western Visayas 4Ps division chief and regional program coordinator, said the 15,311 form part of the 23,548 households in Negros Occidental earlier subjected to SWDI re-assessment.
As a result, 7,770 households were deleted from the list as they were already tagged as “non-poor”, which means they are now able to provide for their needs as they have already sources of income, and their children have already graduated from school and been employed.
This will give a chance for other families to also join the 4Ps program, Gebusion said.
Of the 15,311 households reactivated to the 4Ps program, a total of 3,831 are in Bacolod City and 11,480 in different local government units of Negros Occidental.
Gebusion said the DSWD is now processing the retroactive payment – from January until September this year – of reactivated households, which will receive amounts ranging from P14,850 to P31,050 each.
The DSWD uses the SWDI as a case management tool to determine the progress of the households by measuring their level of well-being in terms of economic sufficiency and social adequacy. | GB
