The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has assessed over 14.49 million families or 92.3 percent of the 16.1 million households targeted to be evaluated under the third-round assessment of Listahanan or the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR).
(MANILA BULLETIN)
Director Justin Batocabe of the DSWD- National Household Targeting Office (NHTO) disclosed that around 14,492,065 households have been assessed under the agency’s “Listahanan 3.”
"As of 31 December 2020, a total of 14,492,065 households or 92.3 percent of the total target were successfully assessed by the Listahanan field workers through house-to-house interviews,” he relayed to the Manila Bulletin in a text message.
He noted that of the number of assessed households, 100 percent of the Household Assessment Forms (HAFs) were already encoded in the database and completed by December last year.
In a Viber message, DSWD spokesperson Irene Dumlao also provided the same data to the Manila Bulletin when asked about the number of households assessed under Listahanan 3.
Batocabe disclosed that “all Field Offices except CALABARZON were able to produce an initial list of poor households and ready for the Validation Phase by January 2021.”
He laments that the despite the hard work of their field workers, they were not able to achieve the 100-percent completion rate by year end because of the pandemic, typhoons and other disasters encountered in 2020.
The DSWD was eyeing to complete the Listahanan 3 by end of December 2020.
The Listahanan or the NHTS-PR is an information management system that identifies who and where the poor are. It is updated every four years.
The DSWD had clarified that those who were included in the Listahanan 3 are not automatically entitled to receive any cash assistance from the government or be included in any of its programs.
“However, the data that will be generated by the program will be used by national government agencies (NGAs), local government units (LGUs), non-government organizations (NGOs), and other institutions as a reference for beneficiary selection to ensure that qualified poor households will be prioritized for poverty alleviation programs and other appropriate interventions,” it said.