The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) is now serving a total of 305,920 poor families in the CALABARZON region under the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program.

Based on the report of DSWD Field Office IV-A, a total of 14,539 of the 305,920 families being served are newly registered beneficiaries for the second semester of 2013.  These newly registered poor family-beneficiaries are from all cities and municipalities in the region except in four pilot areas in Quezon Province namely Buenavista, San Narciso, San Francisco and San Andres.

According to DSWD IV-A Dir Leticia T. Diokno, the registration of new beneficiaries is part of the Department’s effort to expand the program and reach more qualified poor families with zero to 14 years old children nationwide.

“These new beneficiaries were identified based on the targeting system – Listahanan, formerly known as the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR).  We hope that this expansion would encourage the beneficiaries, especially the parents, to continuously cooperate and participate in the program by complying with the set conditions for the education and health needs of their children,” Dir Diokno said.

The Pantawid Pamilya is a core social protection program of the national government that provides conditional cash grant to qualified poor families for the education and health needs of children zero to 14 years old. Cash grants are provided to beneficiaries upon compliance to the program’s set conditions including 85% monthly school attendance of children and monthly preventive health checkup among others.

Of the total family-beneficiaries, the DSWD is now catering to the educational and health needs of more than 800,000 children in the region. As of payout reports, the DSWD has provided a total of Php2,349,770,800.00 cash grants to beneficiaries who complied with the program’s conditions from January to October 2013 alone.***