By NG Seruela
The Commission on Population and Development (POPCOM) encouraged community pantry organizers nationwide to include contraceptives as “necessary goods” in their initiative.
In a statement by the agency, based on an interview, POPCOM Executive Director Undersecretary Juan Antonio Perez III noted the significance of family planning services and commodities amid the COVID-19 pandemic to “help prevent unplanned and teenage pregnancies.”
“POPCOM is very much supportive of community pantries as a form of collective action in alleviating the need for sustenance of our less privileged. We believe that they will welcome the addition of condoms and pills among the goods they will source—with the help of their local healthcare personnel,” he said.
Perez said community pantry organizers should ask the assistance of local health personnel such as barangay health workers and family planning and barangay population volunteers in distributing contraceptives because they are “knowledgeable of the individuals in their locale who need pills and condoms.”
“These laudable initiatives are observable proofs of our countrymen’s desire that no one of his fellow Filipinos will be left behind in terms of basic necessities as we continuously face the COVID-19 crisis head on. It’s an outward display of their innate drive for inclusivity in our society, where human development is a work in progress, even during a health crisis,” Perez said.
POPCOM has also ordered its regional offices to “actively” participate in community pantries in their respective areas by re-supplying their existing family planning clients, providing onsite family planning information, and extending assistance that local government units may request. -jlo
