The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) is close to completing its payouts for the second tranche of the government’s Social Amelioration Program (SAP) as it already reached some 11.26 million family beneficiaries with PHP73 billion worth of financial aid.
DSWD, the lead implementer of SAP, on Monday said it only needs to deliver around PHP2.84 billion more of the emergency subsidy after their newly announced number of target beneficiaries, which is 14.1 million.
This is the trimmed-down figure of low-income family beneficiaries who were identified as the most affected sector during the public health crisis.
The agency came up with the new target after verifying the eligibility of its beneficiaries.
Undersecretary Glen Paje said in a previous uSAP Tayo briefer that “the deduplication process for the beneficiaries have caused a delay in the timeline but DSWD needs to make sure that they are giving the aid, the people’s money to deserving recipients”.
As of August 1, a total of 842,014 families received duplicate assistance after they were cross-matched with the databases of the DSWD’s Emergency Subsidy Program and Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), as well as with the Department of Agriculture’s Financial Subsidy to Rice Farmers (DA-FSRF), Department of Labor and Employment’s COVID-19 Adjustment Measures Program (DOLE-CAMP), and the Department of Finance-Social Security System’s Small Business Wage Subsidy Program (DOF-SSS-SBWSP).
DSWD said it also found around 200,000 of the identified beneficiaries to be ineligible.
The local government units (LGUs), it said, only submitted some 3.2 million names.
They were short with some 2.8 million families that were the projected number set by the agency for waitlisted or left-out beneficiaries –– those that should receive two batches of aid because they were not identified as beneficiaries during the distribution of the first tranche of aid.
They also have not completely uploaded the encoded Social Amelioration Card (SAC) forms, which serve as basis for the department’s processes in coming up with its clean list of beneficiaries for the second tranche and for the waitlisted, DSWD added.
The 14.1 million target beneficiaries are comprised of some 1.3 million 4Ps beneficiaries in areas placed under enhanced community quarantine (ECQ); 7.2 million non-4Ps beneficiaries in ECQ areas from May 1 to 15; 3.2 million waitlisted families nationwide who did not receive the first tranche; and 2.1 million waitlisted families in ECQ areas from May 1 to 15.
It was also announced that the beneficiaries from DOLE’s Tulong Panghanapbuhay sa Ating Disadvantaged/Displaced Workers (TUPAD) and DA’s FSRF are also in the new list of SAP recipients with DSWD providing the top-up assistance.
Secretary Rolando Joselito Bautista has earlier announced that they are confident they will finish the distribution by August 15. (PNA)
