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Central Government, Government Data Management

The Philippines leverages Poverty Database for social development

By Clarice Africa | 10 February 2012

A regional encoding station will be inaugurated today in Davao City by Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio and select officials from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), as part of the agency’s efforts to support data encoding activities for the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR).

The NHTS-PR, a project by DSWD, aims to establish a unified, functional, objective, and transparent targeting system that would identify the poorest households and where they are, as basis for identifying beneficiaries of social protection programs.

According to Sharmayne Maranguit, DSWD Regional Information Technology Officer, the regional encoding station will enable the regional department to effectively monitor the encoding activities of the NHTS-PR, and as well as properly organise and harmonise the integrity of the Household Assessment Forms (HAF).

Maranguit explained that the data coming from the enumerators through the HAF will be encoded into an online information system that centralises all submissions into an online database in the NHTS-PR National Program Management Office lodged at DSWD Central Office.

“Data encoders will form a critical role in transforming the manually completed HAF data into a digital and validated entry format and forward it to the NHTS-PR database for further data processing,” she said.

Data generated in the NHTS-PR include family size, Educational attainment, access to health centres, sanitation facilities, utilities, water source, roof materials, as well as prevalence of displacement, disability, senior citizens and solo parents.

The data then is used as basis for classification of households into the following:

• Food Poor - families whose income is below the food threshold level or are not able to meet their basic food requirements;

• Survival Poor - Families who are in between the food and poverty threshold. They are able to meet their food but not their basic requirements; and

• Non-Poor - Families living above the poverty threshold and are able to meet their basic requirements.

The project which costs about PhP 722 million (USD 16.9 million) is being used to identify the bottom poor to eliminate the potential politicising of the system, which creates further inequities and marginalisation.

From its implementation in 2009, the project has enumerated 9,115,764 households, encoded 9,055,370 households, subjected 8,957,260 households to Proxy Means Test and identified 4,213,227 households as poor.

At present, DSWD’s Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program and Social Pension for Indigent Senior Citizens are both using NHTSPR data in identifying beneficiaries.

The Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program is a poverty reduction and social development strategy of the national government that provides conditional cash grants to extremely poor households to improve their health, nutrition and education particularly of children aged 0-14.

In addition, just recently, PhilHealth, the Department of Health and the Regional Development Council in Region 11 have entered an agreement with DSWD to use the NHTS-PR data in their respective social protection programs.

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