From the Department of Social Welfare and Development
The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) will hire and train 1,245 staff members to validate beneficiaries of Social Pension for Indigent Senior Citizens and Modified Conditional Cash Transfer (MCCT) Program.
The staff members will be hired through Listahanan, the national household targeting system for poverty reduction. They will be assigned as area coordinators, area supervisors, enumerators, and encoders.
Of the total number of staff to be hired, 878 will be assigned to validate the status of the 132,000 beneficiaries of the Social Pension who are not in the Listahanan database, while 371 will assess potential beneficiaries for the MCCT Program. DSWD targets to include around 63,000 families in the MCCT.
Social Pension is being implemented in accordance with the Expanded Senior Citizen’s Act of 2010. It grants qualified beneficiaries P500 monthly stipend each to augment their daily subsistence and medical needs.
The MCCT, on the other hand, provides cash grants to street and displaced families, nomadic indigenous peoples (IPs) or those living in geographically isolated and disadvantaged areas provided that they comply with its conditions on health and education.
“For the Social Pension, the purpose of the special validation is to verify the poverty status of its current recipients and ensure that only the poor senior citizens will continue receiving benefits,” explained DSWD Secretary Corazon Juliano-Soliman.
DSWD field offices will facilitate the recruitment and screening of applicants beginning April 2014.
Applicants can submit their application to the nearest DSWD office or to the Social Welfare and Development Team office.
The special validations will start by the 2nd quarter of 2014.