By Jennifer P. Rendon
Emergency cash assistance will be given to qualified families who were not included in the first tranche of the distribution of the government’s Social Amelioration Program (SAP).
The Department of Social Welfare and Development Field Office VI (DSWD 6) said about five million additional families will receive the cash aid.
Left-out or waitlisted households are low-income families who are not recipients of any conditional cash transfer and were not included in the initial 18 million households who benefited from the first tranche of SAP financial assistance.
“Dahil po nakinig ang gobyerno sa inyong mga apila. Ito po ay pagkakataon na yung mga hindi napasama sa unang SAP ay mabayaran natin,” DSWD regional director Ma. Evelyn Macapobre said.
For Western Visayas, Macapobre said the number of additional families who will receive SAP has yet to be determined pending the submission of names from the local government units (LGUs).
Macapobre said LGUs will be solely responsible in identifying eligible families to be included in the additional list of SAP beneficiaries, based on Memorandum Circular No. 14, series of 2020.
LGUs have until June 9, 2020 to submit the list of left-out or waitlisted families.
Included in the additional families are eligible families who were not included in the first tranche due to limited funds.
Macapobre said families of Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) beneficiaries who were tagged as moved out in the Pantawid database before January 16, 2020 can also be included on the left-out list.
Also eligible are families in the 4Ps roster who were not provided with SAP on the first tranche due to late registration, late reactivation of household, late submission of documentary attachments and updates, newly registered replacement households, and modified conditional cash transfer households excluded during the matching validation procedure.
Under the new guidelines, senior citizens receiving a P6,000 pension and below will also receive the SAP grant.
Macapobre emphasized that for couples to be eligible, their combined pension should not go beyond P6,000.
Those who are engaged by the government and are only receiving allowances or honorarium below P6,000 can also be qualified for SAP.
These include barangay tanods, daycare workers, barangay health workers and barangay nutrition scholars, as stated on the guidelines.
Macapobre said once the LGUs have submitted their list of left-out families to the field office, it will undergo duplicity checks at the regional and inter-regional levels.
The deduplication process entails the cross-matching of the list with the available database of the DSWD and other agencies implementing SAP.
After the duplicity check, a certified list of eligible additional beneficiaries for SAP will then be generated and may also be submitted to the Department of Finance for further validation, Macapobre said.
Meanwhile, as of 12 pm of June 8, the DSWD-6 already gave out P8.2 billion SAP grants to more than 1.45 million families in the region.
Among them are the 1,130,589 non-conditional cash transfer beneficiaries and 321,747 families who are members of 4Ps.
Non-CCT beneficiaries received P6,000 SAP assistance from DSWD through their LGUs while the 4Ps received P4,650 as top up on their monthly rice subsidy of P600 and P750 health grant.
The agency was able to provide P6,783,534,000 for non-CCT beneficiaries and P1,496,123,550 for 4Ps families.
