The Philippine government is seeking a one-year extension and partial reallocation of a World Bank loan that has been partly funding the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) since 2021.
A World Bank restructuring paper showed that the Department of Finance (DOF) on Sept. 17 requested the Washington-based multilateral lender to extend the project implementation and loan validity period of the $600-million Philippines Beneficiary FIRST Social Protection Project to June 30, 2026, from June 30, 2025, originally.
The acronym "FIRST" stands for "fast, innovative, and responsive service transformation” for the 4.4 million poor families targeted to receive conditional cash transfers by the end of 2024.
This loan was approved by the World Bank in September 2020 — at the height of the most stringent Covid-19 lockdowns. It took effect in January of the following year.
The DOF also asked the World Bank to reallocate $95 million in loan proceeds from performance-based condition expenditures to Pantawid cash grants being distributed by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) through the 4Ps.
"The project experienced significant delays initially, aside from the immediate Covid-19 response, due to pandemic-related implementation challenges and weak ownership. However, things began to turn around in 2022 when new leadership took charge," the World Bank document read, referring to the Marcos Jr. administration.
The World Bank assigned this project a "satisfactory" rating in terms of overall implementation progress towards achieving its development objective of mitigating Covid-19's impacts on low income households' welfare, while strengthening the DSWD's social protection delivery systems to become adaptive and efficient beyond the pandemic.
To date, $489.11 million, or 81.5 percent of the loan, has been disbursed.
However, the World Bank conceded that "despite significant progress in key technical areas, it is unlikely that all performance-based conditions will be achieved within the project implementation period."
For the World Bank, "the no-cost one year extension of the project will allow many multi-year activities to be executed and bear fruits for improving beneficiary experiences."