...the program is a weak foundation in the drive against poverty in the country. Five major concerns can be raised. First, the program is a one-shot affair that peaks in 2013 and is virtually over after 2018....Perhaps not coincidentally, the peak of program implementation in 2014 happens right before assessment of the country’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) performance in 2015. ...second concern: the CCT program does not address entrenched economy-wide problems of joblessness and low incomes that cause poverty in the country... The CCT intervention certainly has powerful intuitive appeal. At the core is the idea that families are poor because they do not have enough money; if they have more money, even if only temporarily, then they will be less poor.... The CCT program however is just a micro household level intervention that does not contribute to resolving the roots of the economy’s agricultural and industrial backwardness. The government itself backhandedly implies that the problem is intractable... If anything, all the CCT program may do is just give a temporary income, health and education edge to its recipients in the scramble for finite work in the country. It would even be redundant to the extent that beneficiaries would have done the conditions even without the program. Third, various implementation problems are already emerging at every stage of the CCT process. Accounts are streaming in from areas as dispersed as the Cordillera, Central Luzon, Bicol, Southern Tagalog, Eastern Visayas, Western Visayas and Mindanao. x x x ... fourth concern: the program has been and is being rapidly expanded without benefit of any major study on its implementation and impact... This rapid expansion has taken place without benefit of any correspondingly expansive studies on implementation or impact. The DSWD only had two studies at hand last year when it requested the huge increase in its budget for 2011 – a report by the Ateneo de Manila Institute of Philippine Culture (IPC) and another by the Social Weather Stations (SWS). x x x Finally, as a “cornerstone” anti-poverty strategy, it is an expensive, unsustainable, short-sighted and artificial trickle-down mechanism. ... The most certain anti-poverty impact of the program is the immediate income relief but this is fleeting in nature and only lasts as long as beneficiaries are enrolled and as long as there is a program in place... The economics of the household are moreover very different from the economics of the country... Is the economy as a whole creating jobs? Have the prospects for decent work and incomes for everyone in the country improved? Is agriculture modernizing and are local industries being built?... Yet the CCT program does not address this. Instead, it implicitly acknowledges the failure of the economy in trickling down gains to the poor. Then, it creates an artificial mechanism for this through the national budget – a mechanism which is literally a pantawid (temporary) welfare scheme at best. So we have a multi-billion peso program that is rapidly expanding but not because of any proven effectiveness. Despite the hype, the program does not address the roots of poverty in the country, is short-lived by design and due to wind-up soon after the global MDG review in 2015.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 05:05:58 +0000
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