A Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) official on Wednesday, Sept. 18 urged household-beneficiaries of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) to utilize the grants to support their children’s education and health.
“I hope our 4Ps beneficiaries take care of the grants. I always say, use them wisely, as they can help improve your lives when your children are educated and healthy,” DSWD-4Ps National Program Manager and Director Gemma Gabuya said in Filipino, during the second episode of DSWD’s 4Ps Fastbreak livestreamed on its Facebook page.
Gabuya reiterated that the 4Ps provides conditional cash transfers to poor households to improve the health, nutrition, and education aspects of their lives.
“For education, we provide P300 per child monthly for elementary students for ten months; P500 for high school students; and P700 for senior high school students,” she explained.
The 4Ps program also provides each household-beneficiary with a monthly rice subsidy of P600 and health grants of P750.
Gabuya said a maximum of three monitored children per household are covered by the 4Ps program.
Each 4Ps household is also automatically enrolled in the National Health Insurance Program, or PhilHealth.
Gabuya also said that beneficiaries can access the DSWD’s Sustainable Livelihood Program (SLP) and similar programs offered by other government agencies or accredited private institutions.
The DSWD also pushed for stronger partnerships and impactful convergence with other national government agencies for the 4Ps during a Visioning and Convergence Planning Workshop held from Sept. 10 to 13.
“The return on investment will take a long time—10 to 15 years—but the 4Ps program is a great help. From this workshop, we can still produce more top achievers and more college graduates among the children who have benefited from the 4Ps program,” Gabuya said.
The 4Ps is a national poverty reduction strategy institutionalized under Republic Act No. 11310, or “An Act Institutionalizing Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps),” signed on April 17, 2019.
The program focuses on providing indigent families with the means to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty through human capital investments.
Currently, it has nearly 4.4 million household-beneficiaries nationwide.