By Leilanie Adriano/Philippine News Agency
LAOAG CITY — The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) Regional Field Office-National Household Targeting Unit (NHTU) is set to conduct its third round of assessment and update of the database of poor families and households that will be recipients of social protection programs nationwide.
Jaymante Pearl Apilado, information officer of DSWD, said hiring is ongoing for a total of 3,136 enumerators, area supervisors, and coordinators who will be needed to visit pre-identified poor households in the entire region covering Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, La Union, and Pangasinan.
“So by June and July, we will start training them ready for the intensive field validation,” she said Tuesday.
Apilado said there are 97,551 households in the region, which will be assessed from August to September this year.
The comprehensive “Listahanan” database of poor households is being updated every four years and serves as the basis for selecting the beneficiaries of social protection programs and services.
As in previous years, poor households will be assessed based on the Proxy Means Test (PMT) conducted by the DSWD National Household Targeting Office (NHTO).
PMT is a statistical model that approximates family’s income based on observable and verifiable proxy indicators, such as materials in housing structure, family’s access to basic services and facilities like water and electricity and ownership of specific assets, among others.
In 2015, the second assessment identified 12,137 poor households among the 104,853 assessed households in Ilocos Norte.
It was learned that the top three major assets of poor households in the province are cellular phones, television and radio. Some of them still do not have access to electricity, safe water source, and sanitary toilet facility.
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