The Philippine Online Chronicles

The government has extended benefits to at least 1.6 million Filipinos through its Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program as of May 31 this year.

However, Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) secretary Dinky Soliman said during a Senate committee on finance hearing on Tuesday that the agency is still in need of P2 billion to provide grants to over two million households for its Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps).

As a project under the 4Ps, the CCT program provides a P1,400 monthly stipend to 2.3 million of the 4.6 million poorest families in the Philippines. It is being implemented in 17 regions, 79 provinces, 75 cities, and 915 municipalities.

The administration has already spent P4.127 billion of its P21 billion CCT project budget for this year.

“If our request for additional [fund release] would be approved, we would continue with the registration [of families for the CCT program],” Soliman told reporters. “But if we won't get a supplemental budget for that, we would go easy on the registration and we would explain to the beneficiaries that they would get their grant next year.”

The DSWD currently aims to give aid to 4.6 million households.

The CCT program is slated to end in 2013.

During the Senate hearing, Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile also questioned Soliman on the demographics of families benifiting from the CCT.

“They're poor because they have too many children – I want to verify this argument whether there is truth to this,” he said, pointing to the correlation between poverty incidence and the number of children in the family.

Soliman said that they have identified 623,272 qualified poor families in Luzon, and another 142,622 in the Visayas. She added that they have identified the biggest number of qualified families in Mindanao (989,481) because “the incidence of poverty is high” in this area.

A total of 2,055,375 families are already registered in the CCT program, with the agency planning to register another 283,866 by the end of June.