Is the quality of these social services, despite being conditionally tied up to the ayuda, in woefully deteriorated state?
The gnomes of 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington D.C., otherwise known as the World Bank, fashioned a program aimed at reducing poverty by conditional cash transfers (CCT), attaching certain conditions such as school enrolment, and receiving vaccinations for children of poor families.
It succeeded well enough in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Colombia and was also introduced in some Central American countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama where monthly cash payments were tied up to health and education programs.
In Asia, the World Bank advised countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Cambodia, and yes, the Philippines, to implement CCT to help alleviate poverty.
We called ours the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program or 4Ps and tied this up to health, nutrition and educational concerns, with DSWD implementing the cash transfers.
There are some 4.4 million recipients of this form of ayuda, now on-going for some two decades.
Has the 4Ps truly lifted our poor from their bondage through health and education, or is the quality of these social services, despite being conditionally tied up to the ayuda, in woefully deteriorated state?
Go to the wet market, and see that tinderas still have to do simple addition through calculators. Bragging aside, the kind of primary education I got in the fifties allows me, to this date, to add numbers in my mind faster.
Our learning poverty is terrible, whether in reading literacy, comprehension, or simple mathematics. War-torn Vietnam is way ahead of us.
But our politicians whose hearts “bleed” for the poor because there are political pogi points attached and, worse, selfish monetary cuts that could be gained in such programs, have been inventing more and more of these ayuda programs.
COVID 19 and the lockdowns imposed to contain the spread of the infections required ayuda programs as people could not go to work.
These days though, our highly creative politicians have elevated the art of the ayuda into a science, never mind if the names used for their give-aways are “pilit na pilit.”
For the out-of-work and the under-employed, benefitting some 180,000 informal workers, DOLE came up with a Tulong Panghanapbuhay sa Ating Disadvantaged/Displaced Workers or TUPAD. There is an attached Barangay Ko, Bahay Ko program as well by the labor department.
The Department of Health also has a Medical Assistance for Indigent Patients program to assist poor patients who cannot afford the high cost of medicines, apart from the PCSO aid that they are supposed to get, centralized through the Malasakit program, though I do not know whether the series of multi-million wins in the lotto have diminished the agency’s capability.
Then, again through the DSWD, there is the AICS or Assistance to Individuals in Crisis Situations, a catch-all ayuda that includes burial, transportation, education, food, and other support services for people caught in “crisis” situations, the definition of which depends on the selective charity of the legislators and their assigns.
And all along, I thought jueteng and “swer-tres” intelihensiya given to our officials by operators, some now under the guise of the STL, was the fount of such munificence.
TUPAD costs taxpayers some 13 billion a year; MAIP is 10 billion; and AICS is 34 billion pesos this year.
There are others, such 12 billion earmarked tariff collections from rice imports to help farmers increase their productivity, and so many programs of other agencies for their mandated constituents, mostly subsidies, as in the losing proposition called Kadiwa with the forgettable meaning.
And now comes AKAP, or Ayuda sa Kapos ang Kita, which allocates a one-time 5,000 peso cash assistance for the “near poor” (Class D-2 in the surveys?), courtesy of our legislative “bleed-hearts” dispensed through the DSWD, costing 60 billion, with the recent revelation of a 27.5 billion augmentation sneaked in between the bicam agreement of the two houses of Congress and the printed copy of the budget.
As unearthed in the hearings conducted by senators now quarreling with our congressmen over the stupidly-concocted “people’s” initiative, AKAP, AICS, MAIP and even TUPAD are being utilized as inducements for collecting signatures to “abolish” the upper house via “joint” voting in amending the Constitution.
In a previous column last year, we stated government seems to have a simple solution to every problem in this benighted land, and that is “ayuda.”
Still and all, the total of these ayuda programs handled by DSWD, DOLE and DOH, already running into hundreds of billions, pale in comparison to the “ayuda” that legislators have awarded to themselves through the age-old and never-say-die pork barrel entitlements.
My sources tell me that for each of our congressmen, there’s 1 billion each, minimum, in the 2024 budget.
If you are more “active” and “supportive,” it gets to as high as 5 billion, and of course more for those in charge of the super-committees, such as appropriations and public works, headed by party-list congressmen.
As for the senators, why, some are complaining that “hating kapatid” is no longer the norm, wondering why some “only” get 3 billion for their pet projects, while the favored few get 5 or even 6 billion apiece.
Now do the math, and yes, you will need a calculator to compute.