GENERAL SANTOS CITY (MindaNews / 9 April) – The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) in Region 12 will be mobilizing 2,465 field workers for the second cycle of the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR) assessment in the region.
Bai Zorahayda Taha, DSWD Region 12 director, said Wednesday they are currently finalizing the hiring of the field workers in preparation for the scheduled launching by next month of the region-wide assessment.
She said the agency’s National Household Targeting Unit, which is the facilitating body of the project, has allotted a total of 1,615 enumerators, 323 area supervisors, 65 area coordinators, 231 encoders and 231 verifiers for the region.
Taha said the enumerators, area supervisors, area coordinators will be assigned to various target survey areas while the encoders and verifiers will be stationed at the regional office.
The DSWD central office initially scheduled the conduct of the nationwide assessment in the fourth quarter of 2013 but was forced to reset it to the second quarter of this year due to the onslaught of several calamities, among them the super typhoon Yolanda November 28 last year.
The agency specifically deferred the launching of the second assessment as most of its personnel was sent to parts of Eastern and Central Visayas then to assist in the massive relief and recovery efforts for typhoon victims.
NHTS-PR is an information management system that identifies who and where the poor households are, a program briefer said.
It said its system guarantees the establishment and management of a national socio-economic database of poor households using a globally-accepted methodology.
The NHTS-PR database was the sole basis for the selection of beneficiaries of the national government’s anti-poverty programs, among them the continuing Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program or the conditional cash transfer initiative and the social pension for poor senior citizens as well as other marginalized and vulnerable sectors.
In Region 12, Taha said the agency is targeting to assess the socio-economic status of 775,335 households for the second round of the NHTS-PR, which adopted the official brand name “Listahanan” and tagline “Talaan ng Pamilyang Nangangailangan.”
She said all provinces, municipalities and cities in the region will be covered by the assessment.
She said they are specifically targeting to “visit and interview” a total of 245,055 households in North Cotabato; 212,590 in South Cotabato; 146,777 in Sultan Kudarat; 93,178 in Sarangani; and, 77,736 in Cotabato City.
During the launching of the NHTS-PR in 2009, DSWD-12 assessed a total of 581,853 households in the entire region.
The assessment results showed that some 296,043 households in the area were considered as poor and eventually targeted for various social services of the national government.
For the second NHTS-PR survey, DSWD-12 is targeting to assess a total of 193,482 poor households in the region.
