The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) recently conducted training for the field staff who will be undertaking the household assessment of the beneficiaries of the Social Pension and the Modified Conditional Cash Transfer (MCCT) programs in the CALABARZON region.

The said assessment, which is considered as special validation under the Listahanan targeting system, aims to ensure that the beneficiaries of the Social Pension and the MCCT programs are genuinely indigent or poor and qualified beneficiaries.

The Social Pension or the Social Pension for Indigent Senior Citizen as stated in the Expanded Citizen Act (RA 9994) helps senior citizens who are at least 77 years old and do not receive any pension and support from any member of his / her family.

The MCCT, on the other hand, is one of the modes under the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program.  It focuses on families who do not have permanent residence, particularly street families, migrant indigenous people (IPs) and displaced families due to manmade or natural disasters.

In her message to the participants, Dir Leticia T. Diokno of the DSWD Field Office IV-A emphasized that each staff (the area supervisors, area coordinators and enumerators) have an important role in the conduct of the special validation that will eventually lead to the improved lives of the beneficiaries of the two programs.

Also discussed during the training were the processes in the conduct of the validation including the correct way of filling out the Family Assessment Form, which is one of the tools used by the Listahanan targeting system in the assessment of poor households. The participants also underwent an actual field enumeration exercise in Brgy Tadlac, Los Baños, Laguna.

For this special validation, at least 10,000 households regionwide will be included in the assessment.  The special validation is expected to commence by May and end in June 2014 for CALABARZON region alone.

The said special validation is different from the Listahanan second round of household assessment, which is also expected to be undertaken within 2014. The Listahanan, or formerly the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR), is an information management system of the Department which primarily seeks to identify who and where the poor are.  It aims to generate a masterlist of poor families nationwide that would serve as basis for identifying beneficiaries of the different national and local programs and services for the poor.  Aside from the Social Pension and the MCCT, other programs include the regular  Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program and the Sustainable Livelihood Program of the DSWD.***