MARIE RODLENE G.

MALLEN MABA, 2 nd SEMESTER

2021
Seminar on Current Economics Problem Position Paper No. 2

PANTAWID PAMILYANG PILIPINO PROGRAM (4PS) –

A NATIONAL POVERTY REDUCTION STRATEGY OF THE GOVERNMENT

Conditional cash transfers (CCT) are essentially providing financial incentives or

resources to poor families in exchange for their compliances to a set of conditions
aimed at improving their capacities. More often than not, the conditionalities are linked
to education and health outcomes to address the chronic poverty of the household. The
rationale is by infusing additional income (cash grants) to households, they would be
better equipped to meet their basic needs at present while the conditionalities ensure
that they also increase their human capital investment so that their standard of living is
improved in the long-run.

The Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program is implemented in the Philippines as

the central social protection strategy towards alleviating poverty in the short-term and
addressing the intergenerational transmission of poverty in the long run.

I. Introduction

Poverty alleviation strategies and anti-poverty programs are a fundamental

component of welfare policies in both developed and developing countries. In the
Philippines, Pantawid Pamilya was implemented in 2008 in response to this issue,
under the management of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).
The program registered 300,000 beneficiaries in its first year and has been expanded to
serve a total of almost 4.9 million beneficiaries across 144 cities and 1,483
municipalities as of June 2018 (DSWD, 2018).

The 4Ps operates in all the 17 regions in the Philippines, covering 79 provinces,

143 cities, and 1,484 municipalities. Beneficiaries are selected through the National
Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR), which identifies who
and where the poor are in the country (DSWD, 2018).

The program requires beneficiary households to fulfill conditionalities related to

education and health to be qualified to receive program benefits. These conditionalities
strengthen the pathways through which the program intends to achieve impact.

The program conditionalities are the following:

 Health conditionalities for pregnant women
o Health facility visit at least once every two months for pre- and postnatal
care services. The pregnant woman, during her pregnancy should have at
least one prenatal consultation for every trimester.
o Basic/Comprehensive Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care
(BEmONC/ CEmONC) services or delivery from skilled health professional
should be availed by pregnant women
o Availment of postnatal care services within six weeks after delivery of child
 Health conditionalities for children
o Children 0-2 years old: Complete immunization following the DOH
vaccination schedule.
o Children 2-5 years old: Attendance to preventive health check-ups once
every two months.
o Children 6 to 14 years old (school-aged children): Receipt of deworming
pills at least twice per year.
 Education conditionalities
o Children 3-5 years old: Enrollment in Daycare or Kindergarten and
attendance of at least 85 percent of school days in a month.
o Children 6-18 years old: Enrollment in Elementary or High school and
attendance of at least 85 percent of school days in a month; and
 FDS conditionality
o Attendance in monthly Family Development Sessions (FDS) by Pantawid
Pamilya grantee and/or spouse.
 o The FDS is a monthly learning seminar for beneficiary households that
aim to capacitate parents on topics related to parenting, childcare, health
and nutrition, community participation, disaster preparedness, children
and women’s rights, among others. The FDS is the program component
that is primarily expected to generate positive behavioral changes among
beneficiaries, that is, beyond the incentives being provided by the grants.

Pantawid Pamilya Program has undergone the same rigorous evaluations as

other CCTs as part of its monitoring and evaluation system. The first wave of impact
evaluation of Pantawid was initiated in 2011, while the second wave (IE2) was
conducted in 2013. Findings of both evaluations present that the program is on track in
terms of achieving its goals of improving child education and health outcomes through
human capital investments and other support provided by the program (DSWD, 2015).
However, mixed results are also observed for some outcomes, and no program impact
was observed for critical indicators such as total household consumption and infant
immunization in the last two impact evaluations. Marking the tenth year of program
implementation (2018), another impact evaluation was conducted to reassess the
program impact on short term and intermediate outcomes, as well as confirm mixed
results of the previous waves of studies.

II. IMPACT OF THE PROGRAM

According to the recent impact evaluation of DSWD by Randomized Control Trial

(RCT), the findings support administrative and other assessments that have found that
Pantawid Pamilya is reaching most of its key objectives. Their report presented the
findings from an analysis that assessed program impact by comparing outcomes in
areas that received Pantawid Pamilya with outcomes in areas that did not receive the
program. The impacts found are comparable to the levels of impact found in other CCT
programs around the world at this stage of program maturity, particularly in terms of the
 program’s achievements in improved health service use and school enrollment (DSWD,
2020).

The following findings were found:

1. Overall, the program is meeting its objective of helping to keep poor children in school,
by increasing enrollment among younger children (3-11 years old) and increasing
attendance among 6–17-year-olds. The study found higher rates of school enrollment
among children 3-11 years of age in the beneficiary households (by 10 percentage
points for 3–5-year-olds and by 4.5 percentage points for 6–11-year-olds), compared to
poor households who did not receive the program. In particular, it has been successful
in boosting the enrollment of primary-aged children (6-11 years old), helping to bring
about near universal enrollment of 98 percent enrolled in school among this age group.
School attendance improved for all age groups across the beneficiary households,
except for the youngest preschool/daycare age group. However, the findings suggest
that the program has not had a significant impact on increasing enrollment among older
children aged 12-17 years old. It was not explicitly designed to improve schooling of
children above age 14, given that is the age limit for education grants. It was unable to
even improve enrollment of children 12-14 years of age.

2. The program was found to be meeting its objective of helping to keep poor children
healthy. It has helped improve the long-term nutritional status of younger children (6-36
months old). The improvement was a 10-percentage point reduction in severe stunting
compared to barangays that did not receive the program, where 24 percent of young
children (6-36 months old) were severely stunted. This improved long-term nutritional
status was achieved through the program enabling parents to provide better care for
their children in a consistent manner and feed their children more protein-rich food such
as eggs and fish. It has also encouraged poor women to use maternal and child health
services such as antenatal care, postnatal care, regular growth monitoring, and receipt
of Vitamin A and deworming pills.

3. The program is also achieving its objective of enabling poor households to increase
their investments in meeting the health and education needs of their children.
Beneficiary households spent less on adult goods such as alcohol and that the program
 may have contributed to increased savings among beneficiary households. It has
contributed to increased coverage of the PhilHealth health insurance program. More
poor households in areas that received Pantawid Pamilya reported that they were
covered by PhilHealth, compared to their counterparts in non-Pantawid areas.

4. The findings of the impact evaluation also indicate that the program has not affected
decisions to work or fertility rates. Despite the additional household income provided to
poor families under Pantawid Pamilya, the impact evaluation did not find any evidence
that beneficiary households worked less or made less effort to obtain more work.
Women in the beneficiary households are not having any more children than women in
non-beneficiary households.

III. RECOMMENDATION

Although the impact evaluation found evidence of success on a broad range of

outcomes, the results also revealed a number of gaps for Pantawid Pamilya that need
to be addressed such as the negative impact on nutrition, low utilization of some child
and maternal health care services, minimal impact on education among children 3 to 5
years old, and persistent incidence of working children, among others. Thus, the
following recommendations are proposed:

a) To improve educational outcome for older children, additional measures such as

expanding the age of coverage of Pantawid Pamilya, increasing the grant amount for
older children, and parallel supply-side interventions in the education sector should also
be implemented. In a study by Barrera-Osorio et al. (2008) in the CSAE program in
Colombia, schemes that provide bulk cash transfer benefits at the end of each grade
level, and cash transfer benefits conditional to the student’s graduation and subsequent
enrollment in the next level returned even stronger program impacts on education
outcomes than the schemes that depend on monthly attendance. Corollary to this is the
call for concentrating efforts on monitoring older children;
b) Currently households can be enrolled in the program for a maximum of five years.
Expanding the duration of coverage will not only help to keep children in school longer,
it will also help to increase household consumption;

c) Linkages and coordination with health service providers need to be strengthened to

ensure that beneficiary mothers and children receive the services they require and to
ensure a continuum of care;

d) It is important to consider ways in which other social programs that may have a long-
term impact on the welfare of the poor could take advantage of Pantawid Pamilya’s
strong and effective social mobilization structure. Example, the Family Development
Sessions (FDS) offer a potentially powerful platform for providing education on good
parenting practices like exclusive breastfeeding, good feeding practices, remedies for
children with diarrhea, etc., improving financial literacy and access to bank accounts,
and promoting access to and use of other social services; and

e) To ensure more efficient program implementation, the reasons for differences in

program impact across geographical areas must be better identified and understood.

IV. CONCLUSION

Despite a small degree of economic growth (average 4%) over the past decade,
the Philippines has not seen a reduction in the poverty rate. To help address this issue,
the government launched a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program called the
Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (or Pantawid Pamilya), which provided cash
transfers to supplement the income of poor households in selected municipalities,
subject to their compliance with conditionality related to education and health. Through
this program, people have clearly felt and seen the helping hand of the state effectively
at work, as evidenced by the overwhelming support of beneficiaries and non-
beneficiaries alike.

However, there are still important issues that need to be addressed to maintain
and enhance its impact on the welfare of the poor. But despite its gaps, this program
has, without a doubt, greatly helped in alleviating the economic condition of poor
families by raising awareness and access to information among poor households, better
access to social services and by providing educational and health care opportunities. It
is changing the spending patterns of poor households, with beneficiary households
spending more on health and education than poor households who had not received the
program.

V. SOURCES

 Acosta, Pablo; Avalos, Jorge; Zapanta, Arianna, 2019. Pantawid Pamilya 2017

Assessment: An Update of the Philippine Conditional Cash Transfer’s
Implementation Performance. World Bank Social Protection Policy Note,no.
18;. World Bank, Washington, DC.

 Orbeta, Aniceto C.; Paqueo, Vicente B., 2016: Pantawid Pamilya Pilipino Program:
Boon or Bane?; PIDS Discussion Paper Series, No. 2016-56, Philippine Institute for
Development Studies (PIDS), Quezon City

 Orbeta, Aniceto C.; Melad, Kris Ann M.; Araos Nina Victoria V., 2021: Reassessing
the Impact of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program: Results of the Third Wave
Impact Evaluation; PIDS Discussion Paper Series, No. 2021-05, Philippine Institute
for Development Studies (PIDS), Quezon City