DSWD-9 SET TO UPDATE REGION’S LIST OF POOR HOUSEHOLDS

The Department of Social Welfare and Development Field Office IX is set to conduct another household assessment to update the National Household Targeting System’s (NHTS) data. The said assessment or On-Demand Application (ODA) aims to provide an opportunity for households who were not included or assessed during the initial enumeration conducted last April 2009-March 2010 but whose place of residence was identified within the target area.

According to Mr. Hasan Alfad, DSWD IX Planning Officer and Focal person for NHTS the ODA will be primarily pursued in 16 priority municipalities of the region sometime this month to September.

Each municipality will have a scheduled 10-day assessment period where the local government units through their social welfare offices will assist the hired supervisors in the conduct of the activity.

The house-to-house interviews in the 16 areas will be handled by the area supervisors who were hired by DSWD.

Just recently, the supervisors attended an orientation on the conduct of the ODA with the respective municipal social welfare officers of the 16 areas.

The DSWD, in its drive to target the real poor households of the country as basis for government programs and services came up with the NHTS in 2009. It is a data bank and an information management system that identifies who and where the poor are. The system guarantees the generation and establishment of a socio-economic database of poor households which were gathered by enumerators from the barangays during the nationwide conduct of survey last year.

As a process, the data culled from the communities are encoded and elevated to the national project management office who administers the feeding of the data to a proxy-means test (PMT) system which generates the list of poor and non-poor households. This master list will then be downloaded to the DSWD regional office concerned which will further verify the accuracy of the data through a validation process. The validation process includes the posting of the master list in a conspicuous area in the community for further verification.

The 16 areas for the ODA are Buug, Diplahan, Imelda, Kabasalan, Naga, Siay and Ipil for Zamboanga Sibugay while Aurora, Guipos, Josefina, Labangan, Molave and Ramon Magsaysay for Zamboanga del Sur plus the cities of Zamboanga, Pagadian and Isabela.

Results based on the 2003 released statistics of the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) showed that 30 families out of 100 are living in slums, or makeshift houses of indigenous materials, do not have access to clean water, are unable to send their children to school, and are generally denied of other essential services including hospitals. And out of the 30 families, 24 do not have enough food to eat. (DSWD-9, PIA9-BST)