The Department of Social Welfare and Development’s (DSWD) strategy to ensure focused targeting of beneficiaries on Social Pension Program and Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program through the recently held special validation is near to completion.

As of July 23, the Family Assessment Forms (FAF) encoding has reached 85% or 9,202 forms encoded. This is a part of the special validation for Social Pension (SocPen) and Modified Conditional Cash Transfer for Families in Need of Special Protection (MCCT-FNSP) beneficiaries.

The special validation is being conducted by the Listahanan or the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR) Project of the DSWD Field Office 1.

According to the Regional Information Technology Officer Aristedeo V. Tinol, it is in this phase that all sets of information gathered by the enumerators are checked on accuracy and completeness before encoding to the FAF Data Entry Application.

Encoders are now encoding the remaining corrected and completed FAFs which were returned to the Area Supervisors for revalidation.

The FAFs were encoded in the system with accurate data, that will finally undergo Proxy Means Test (PMT) running to determine the poverty status of the SocPen and MCCT-FNSP beneficiaries/recipients who are not registered in the Listahanan database of poor households.

Meanwhile, Statistician Glynnis S. Casuga reported that the encoding of the Barangay/Community Characteristics (BCC) has already reached 98.59% from the 3,265 total barangays in Region 1.

This activity will guarantee the resumption of the payment as monthly stipends to qualified SocPen beneficiaries. It will also lead to the inclusion of MCCT-FNSP beneficiary-families in the Listahanan database of poor households thus, advancing them to the regular Pantawid Pamlilyang Pilipino Program. (by: Jaesem Ryan A. Gaces, Administrative Assistant III, Listahanan/NHTS-PR).