The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has declared that the "Listahanan 3" or the third round of assessment of poor households in the country is now on “validation and finalization phase.”

DSWD Secretary Rolando Bautista bared that the communities will be given the opportunity to look at the initial list of poor households for their validation.

"Sa kasalukuyan ay nasa validation at finalization phase na ang Listahanan 3. Dito ay bibigyan ng pagkakataon ang mga komunidad na suriin ang initial na listahan ng mga poor households na ipapaskil sa kanilang barangay,” he said.

(Currently, the Listahanan 3 is on validation and finalization phase. In this phase, the communities will be given the chance to scrutinize the initial list of the poor households which will be posted in their barangay.)

He said the households who have questions and concerns about the initial list of households, they may go to the nearest office of the DSWD or to the local social welfare development office.

Bautista noted that the agency has completed the Data Collection and Analysis Phase of the Listahanan 3.

He said as of end of 2020, the DSWD has assessed over 14.5 million households 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).

He said 100 percent of the Household Assessment Forms (HAFs) were already registered and encoded in the database and completed by December last year.

Listahanan or the NHTS-PR is an information management system that identifies who and where the poor are. It is updated every four years.

Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the DSWD decided to temporarily suspend the conduct of the house-to-house validation for Listahanan 3. It was in June last year, when DSWD Secretary Rolando Bautista gave the green light to resume the third round of the household assessment by approving the National Action Plan for the continuation of the data collection, encoding, and validation operations for Listahanan 3.

The Department said 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.

"DSWD also clarified that the inclusion to Listahanan does not guarantee any provision of cash aid or automatic inclusion to any program of the government,” it said.

"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 added.