“Complementing the Conditional Cash Transfer Program”
“Complementing the Conditional Cash Transfer Program”
By Ramon Ike Villareal Señeres, CESO, CSEE
Our Barangay Inc. (OBI) is planning to support the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program of the government that is now being implemented through the Department of Social Work and Development (DSWD). The support will come in the form of a software program that will computerize the distribution system, complete with a “cashless” identification card system. This move by OBI will set a good precedent in the goal of productive cooperation between the government and the civic groups, along the spirit of Public and Private Partnership (PPP).
Aside from being a co-founder of OBI, I am also a co-founder of HYHO Clubs International, a new organization that was recently formed. “HELP YOURSELF, HELP OTHERS” is the international motto of HYHO, from which its name is derived.
The concept behind HYHO is to form local clubs in schools and workplaces, thereafter federating these local clubs into an international organization of national clubs, bound together by the common purpose of enabling club members to help themselves and to help others in gaining access to the twelve basic human needs namely culture, education, employment, energy, entrepreneurship, food, justice, health, mobility, safety, shelter and water services.
The primary objective of HYHO is to assist its members so that they could help themselves in gaining access to the twelve basic human needs. It is the sworn duty of the global organization of HYHO Clubs to support the national and local clubs in these twelve service areas. The secondary objective is to help others so that they too, could gain access to these twelve services.
The purpose of HYHO is to enable local clubs so that they could help themselves by becoming self-sufficient. This is the meaning of “help yourself”. Being a service organization however, all local clubs are also encouraged to serve their own host communities. This is the meaning of “help others”.
I understand that the primary objective of the government in implementing the CCT program is to help those who are extremely poor to meet their most basic needs. There appears to be a secondary objective however, and that is to ensure that the children of these families would really go to school, and that these children would really be provided with good health care. Hence, the cash amounts are transferred to the beneficiaries on the condition that they will send their children to school, and that they will bring them to the health centers for regular check-ups.
Given the fact that the money is already allocated, and that these are already being transferred on a regular basis, it may be a good idea to add a tertiary objective, and that is to try and converge the delivery of the ten other basic human needs to these families, in the process taking advantage of the opportunity to measure over a period of time how the delivery of these basic human needs would impact on their socio-economic conditions. Chances are, it is highly possible that providing money, education and healthcare to these families could be a way for them to get out of poverty. If and when this could happen, the government should be able to get the data, and that is only possible if we design and implement a database system that will collect and analyse the data.
The Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations (UN) tracks the performance of member countries in lowering their poverty rates, illiteracy rates and mortality rates. Perhaps it is part of the design of the government to transfer cash to extremely poor families in order to lower the poverty rate, to send their children to school in order to lower the illiteracy rate, and to bring their children to health centers in order to lower the mortality rate. If this is really the case, it becomes more important to track the impacts of the CCT program on these three measures, in order to report these to the UN as part of our HDI compliance.
As far as I know, the convergence approach in delivering all the twelve basic human needs to the household level has not been tried yet by the government. I was part of the experiment to deliver eleven basic needs under the Bagong Lipunan Integrated Sites and Services (BLISS) program of the Ministry of Human Settlements (MHS) but I recall that the purpose of the BLISS program was to deliver the eleven basic needs to the community level only, and not to the household level. There are fundamental differences between these two levels, particularly in the specific characteristics of the data that should be gathered.
Given the mandate of each government agency, it is very difficult for them to go beyond what their mandates would allow them to do. This is compounded by the fact that their respective budgets have specific purposes under the General Appropriations Act (GAA), and they could not spend their budgetary allocations for any other purpose other than what is stated in the GAA. By its very nature therefore, the government in general and the bureaucracy in particular is really designed to be fragmented in nature, and it is this institutionalized balkanization that prevents it from delivering all services in a holistic and comprehensive manner, for the purpose of convergence.
The private sector too, is not spared from this uncoordinated behavior. Many companies acting in their corporate capacities or through their private services are delivering many different kinds of basic human needs in many places, each of them going their own ways, so much so that they are unable to form a critical mass in any community anywhere. I am mentioning the community here in the sense that it is the physical setting of all households, but what I am actually proposing is the convergence of public and private sector initiatives at the household level, so that we could graduate entire households from poverty, even if we could only do it one household at a time.
Fortunately, the private sector is not bound by the legal and bureaucratic limitations that are preventing the public sector from acting as one coordinated force. As a matter of fact, the private sector has the potential to lead the public sector so that it could participate in concerted actions in an atmosphere of partnership. Perhaps, this is what the PPP program of the government is all about. After all, the challenge of governance belongs not only to the government, but also to the people, the citizens who are being governed.
Aside from delivering education and health services to the household level via the CCT program, a concerted PPP program that is led by the private sector could also help in delivering the ten other basic human needs to the household level, namely employment, energy, entrepreneurship, food, justice, mobility, recreation, safety, shelter and water services. Selected beneficiaries of the CCT program in specific contiguous physical locations could also become the beneficiaries of these ten other basic human needs. What is important is to have specific physical locations and a predetermined size of the data collection universe.
I recall that the original purpose for organizing OBI is to assist the barangay units in computerizing their health and education programs. We were going to do this by soliciting old computer units, reformatting these with open source operating systems and installing free software into them. Eventually, OBI took on the challenge of connecting these barangay units to the internet, still in line with the objective of computerizing their health and education programs. Now this new initiative to assist in the CCT program enters the picture, which is still consistent with the original OBI goals, because of the built-in health and education components of the CCT program.
HYHO is still in the process of being organized, but I am hoping that once the organization is on stream, it will be able to provide the manpower that is needed by OBI in implementing its programs at the barangay level. On the practical side, all the old computer units that are solicited by OBI will need frequent maintenance, and local HYHO members could provide this service. On the more substantive side however, I am hoping that local HYHO members in the delivery of the additional basic human needs to the household level on one hand and in the gathering of the research data outputs from the household level on the other hand.
Conversely, I am hoping that OBI would be able to help in organizing the local chapters of HYHO. According to the plan of HYHO, it will organize chapters in school campuses and work places, targeting primarily the young students in the campuses, and the young professionals in the work places. In the spirit of open cooperation however, HYHO will also accept as members the older people who are studying or working in these campuses and work places. All told, OBI is in a good position to help in organizing local HYHO clubs, being deeply rooted in the field.
Among the twelve identified basic human needs, only education, employment and food have clearly defined means of measuring access. Access to education is now measured through the literacy rate, access to employment is now measured through the employment rate and access to food is now measured through the hunger rate. These three means of measurement are not really that perfect yet, but at least we have something to work with. Unfortunately however, we still do not have any means of measuring access to energy, entrepreneurship, justice, health, mobility, recreation, safety, shelter and water services. This may be bad news, but the good news is that we have a challenge to meet, and we can do it.
Unlike the measurement of the poverty rate, wherein the data used is empirical, the data that is used in the measurement of the hunger rate is statistical, meaning that it is the result of surveys that ask the respondents whether they have experienced hunger or not within a certain period, usually during the last three months. I would again say that this method is not perfect, but at least the surveys give us data to work with, in the absence of anything else.
Just as we are contented for now with the way the hunger rate is being measured, we could perhaps be contented for now with any method that would give us data about access to energy, entrepreneurship, justice, health, mobility, recreation, safety, shelter and water services, no matter how we do it, for as long as we have something to start with, again in the absence of anything else. Armed with survey forms, members of local HYHO clubs could gather data about access to these basic human needs.
Among these nine missing data sets, we could say that energy, shelter and water are the more tangible ones and are therefore easier to measure. As a matter of fact, the survey takers could see for themselves whether the respondents have it or not, without even asking them. The intangible ones appear to be entrepreneurship, justice, health, mobility, recreation, safety.
Access to entrepreneurship is usually measured in terms of access to affordable capital, to microfinance to be specific. Has the respondent tried to borrow money from a lending source and was denied? For obvious reasons, access to loan sharks could not be considered as having access to affordable capital. If the respondent answers that he or she is borrowing money from a loan shark, it should already be recorded in the survey that he does not have access to entrepreneurship.
Access to justice could be measured in terms of access to affordable legal services. By default, it is the Public Attorney’s Office (PAO) that is mandated to provide free legal services. Off and on, the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) provides free legal assistance here and there, but there seems to be no other source of free legal services that is widely available and continuously sustainable. If the respondent says that he needed justice and he could not get a lawyer, it should be recorded in the survey that he or she does not have access to justice. This apparent scarcity of free legal services is one problem that local HYHO clubs could address.
Access to health is usually measured in terms of having access to a health center or to a public hospital as the case may be. However, it is also generally known that even if the people who are sick could get free consultations from government doctors, they still could not afford the medicines that are prescribed for them, how much more the medical procedures and laboratory tests that are also required. Because of this, the survey question should ask the respondents whether they were able to sustain their medication or not. This should be the way of measuring access to health services.
Access to mobility should be measured not only in terms of availability, but also in terms of affordability. That means there should be two questions in the survey, whether they have access to a public means of transport from their place of residence to their place of work, and whether they could afford the rates of these public transports. Since mobility also includes connectivity, the survey should also ask whether they have either a cell phone or a land line that they are able to sustain.
Access to recreation should be measured in terms of having access to affordable facilities that will recreate the mind (cultural entertainment) and will recreate the body (sports activities).
Access to safety could be measured in the same way that the hunger rate is being measured. The survey should ask the respondents whether they felt being unsafe in the last three months, for any reason such as the presence of criminal activity, the incidence of fires, or the onset of floods.
In the dictionary of the government, it appears that it does not differentiate between poverty reduction and poverty alleviation. Poverty reduction means reducing the poverty rate, poverty alleviation means making poverty more bearable. With a poverty rate of at least 50%, what we need is poverty reduction, and not poverty alleviation. Providing poverty alleviation to a sea of poor people is like applying a soothing lotion to an injured patient who needs an operation. We need to set targets as to how much we aim to reduce the poverty rate in due time.
The author is a broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, political economist and computer technologist. He was formerly Director General of the National Computer Center and Chairman of the National Crime Information System
By Ramon Ike Villareal Señeres, CESO, CSEE
Our Barangay Inc. (OBI) is planning to support the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program of the government that is now being implemented through the Department of Social Work and Development (DSWD). The support will come in the form of a software program that will computerize the distribution system, complete with a “cashless” identification card system. This move by OBI will set a good precedent in the goal of productive cooperation between the government and the civic groups, along the spirit of Public and Private Partnership (PPP).
Aside from being a co-founder of OBI, I am also a co-founder of HYHO Clubs International, a new organization that was recently formed. “HELP YOURSELF, HELP OTHERS” is the international motto of HYHO, from which its name is derived.
The concept behind HYHO is to form local clubs in schools and workplaces, thereafter federating these local clubs into an international organization of national clubs, bound together by the common purpose of enabling club members to help themselves and to help others in gaining access to the twelve basic human needs namely culture, education, employment, energy, entrepreneurship, food, justice, health, mobility, safety, shelter and water services.
The primary objective of HYHO is to assist its members so that they could help themselves in gaining access to the twelve basic human needs. It is the sworn duty of the global organization of HYHO Clubs to support the national and local clubs in these twelve service areas. The secondary objective is to help others so that they too, could gain access to these twelve services.
The purpose of HYHO is to enable local clubs so that they could help themselves by becoming self-sufficient. This is the meaning of “help yourself”. Being a service organization however, all local clubs are also encouraged to serve their own host communities. This is the meaning of “help others”.
I understand that the primary objective of the government in implementing the CCT program is to help those who are extremely poor to meet their most basic needs. There appears to be a secondary objective however, and that is to ensure that the children of these families would really go to school, and that these children would really be provided with good health care. Hence, the cash amounts are transferred to the beneficiaries on the condition that they will send their children to school, and that they will bring them to the health centers for regular check-ups.
Given the fact that the money is already allocated, and that these are already being transferred on a regular basis, it may be a good idea to add a tertiary objective, and that is to try and converge the delivery of the ten other basic human needs to these families, in the process taking advantage of the opportunity to measure over a period of time how the delivery of these basic human needs would impact on their socio-economic conditions. Chances are, it is highly possible that providing money, education and healthcare to these families could be a way for them to get out of poverty. If and when this could happen, the government should be able to get the data, and that is only possible if we design and implement a database system that will collect and analyse the data.
The Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations (UN) tracks the performance of member countries in lowering their poverty rates, illiteracy rates and mortality rates. Perhaps it is part of the design of the government to transfer cash to extremely poor families in order to lower the poverty rate, to send their children to school in order to lower the illiteracy rate, and to bring their children to health centers in order to lower the mortality rate. If this is really the case, it becomes more important to track the impacts of the CCT program on these three measures, in order to report these to the UN as part of our HDI compliance.
As far as I know, the convergence approach in delivering all the twelve basic human needs to the household level has not been tried yet by the government. I was part of the experiment to deliver eleven basic needs under the Bagong Lipunan Integrated Sites and Services (BLISS) program of the Ministry of Human Settlements (MHS) but I recall that the purpose of the BLISS program was to deliver the eleven basic needs to the community level only, and not to the household level. There are fundamental differences between these two levels, particularly in the specific characteristics of the data that should be gathered.
Given the mandate of each government agency, it is very difficult for them to go beyond what their mandates would allow them to do. This is compounded by the fact that their respective budgets have specific purposes under the General Appropriations Act (GAA), and they could not spend their budgetary allocations for any other purpose other than what is stated in the GAA. By its very nature therefore, the government in general and the bureaucracy in particular is really designed to be fragmented in nature, and it is this institutionalized balkanization that prevents it from delivering all services in a holistic and comprehensive manner, for the purpose of convergence.
The private sector too, is not spared from this uncoordinated behavior. Many companies acting in their corporate capacities or through their private services are delivering many different kinds of basic human needs in many places, each of them going their own ways, so much so that they are unable to form a critical mass in any community anywhere. I am mentioning the community here in the sense that it is the physical setting of all households, but what I am actually proposing is the convergence of public and private sector initiatives at the household level, so that we could graduate entire households from poverty, even if we could only do it one household at a time.
Fortunately, the private sector is not bound by the legal and bureaucratic limitations that are preventing the public sector from acting as one coordinated force. As a matter of fact, the private sector has the potential to lead the public sector so that it could participate in concerted actions in an atmosphere of partnership. Perhaps, this is what the PPP program of the government is all about. After all, the challenge of governance belongs not only to the government, but also to the people, the citizens who are being governed.
Aside from delivering education and health services to the household level via the CCT program, a concerted PPP program that is led by the private sector could also help in delivering the ten other basic human needs to the household level, namely employment, energy, entrepreneurship, food, justice, mobility, recreation, safety, shelter and water services. Selected beneficiaries of the CCT program in specific contiguous physical locations could also become the beneficiaries of these ten other basic human needs. What is important is to have specific physical locations and a predetermined size of the data collection universe.
I recall that the original purpose for organizing OBI is to assist the barangay units in computerizing their health and education programs. We were going to do this by soliciting old computer units, reformatting these with open source operating systems and installing free software into them. Eventually, OBI took on the challenge of connecting these barangay units to the internet, still in line with the objective of computerizing their health and education programs. Now this new initiative to assist in the CCT program enters the picture, which is still consistent with the original OBI goals, because of the built-in health and education components of the CCT program.
HYHO is still in the process of being organized, but I am hoping that once the organization is on stream, it will be able to provide the manpower that is needed by OBI in implementing its programs at the barangay level. On the practical side, all the old computer units that are solicited by OBI will need frequent maintenance, and local HYHO members could provide this service. On the more substantive side however, I am hoping that local HYHO members in the delivery of the additional basic human needs to the household level on one hand and in the gathering of the research data outputs from the household level on the other hand.
Conversely, I am hoping that OBI would be able to help in organizing the local chapters of HYHO. According to the plan of HYHO, it will organize chapters in school campuses and work places, targeting primarily the young students in the campuses, and the young professionals in the work places. In the spirit of open cooperation however, HYHO will also accept as members the older people who are studying or working in these campuses and work places. All told, OBI is in a good position to help in organizing local HYHO clubs, being deeply rooted in the field.
Among the twelve identified basic human needs, only education, employment and food have clearly defined means of measuring access. Access to education is now measured through the literacy rate, access to employment is now measured through the employment rate and access to food is now measured through the hunger rate. These three means of measurement are not really that perfect yet, but at least we have something to work with. Unfortunately however, we still do not have any means of measuring access to energy, entrepreneurship, justice, health, mobility, recreation, safety, shelter and water services. This may be bad news, but the good news is that we have a challenge to meet, and we can do it.
Unlike the measurement of the poverty rate, wherein the data used is empirical, the data that is used in the measurement of the hunger rate is statistical, meaning that it is the result of surveys that ask the respondents whether they have experienced hunger or not within a certain period, usually during the last three months. I would again say that this method is not perfect, but at least the surveys give us data to work with, in the absence of anything else.
Just as we are contented for now with the way the hunger rate is being measured, we could perhaps be contented for now with any method that would give us data about access to energy, entrepreneurship, justice, health, mobility, recreation, safety, shelter and water services, no matter how we do it, for as long as we have something to start with, again in the absence of anything else. Armed with survey forms, members of local HYHO clubs could gather data about access to these basic human needs.
Among these nine missing data sets, we could say that energy, shelter and water are the more tangible ones and are therefore easier to measure. As a matter of fact, the survey takers could see for themselves whether the respondents have it or not, without even asking them. The intangible ones appear to be entrepreneurship, justice, health, mobility, recreation, safety.
Access to entrepreneurship is usually measured in terms of access to affordable capital, to microfinance to be specific. Has the respondent tried to borrow money from a lending source and was denied? For obvious reasons, access to loan sharks could not be considered as having access to affordable capital. If the respondent answers that he or she is borrowing money from a loan shark, it should already be recorded in the survey that he does not have access to entrepreneurship.
Access to justice could be measured in terms of access to affordable legal services. By default, it is the Public Attorney’s Office (PAO) that is mandated to provide free legal services. Off and on, the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) provides free legal assistance here and there, but there seems to be no other source of free legal services that is widely available and continuously sustainable. If the respondent says that he needed justice and he could not get a lawyer, it should be recorded in the survey that he or she does not have access to justice. This apparent scarcity of free legal services is one problem that local HYHO clubs could address.
Access to health is usually measured in terms of having access to a health center or to a public hospital as the case may be. However, it is also generally known that even if the people who are sick could get free consultations from government doctors, they still could not afford the medicines that are prescribed for them, how much more the medical procedures and laboratory tests that are also required. Because of this, the survey question should ask the respondents whether they were able to sustain their medication or not. This should be the way of measuring access to health services.
Access to mobility should be measured not only in terms of availability, but also in terms of affordability. That means there should be two questions in the survey, whether they have access to a public means of transport from their place of residence to their place of work, and whether they could afford the rates of these public transports. Since mobility also includes connectivity, the survey should also ask whether they have either a cell phone or a land line that they are able to sustain.
Access to recreation should be measured in terms of having access to affordable facilities that will recreate the mind (cultural entertainment) and will recreate the body (sports activities).
Access to safety could be measured in the same way that the hunger rate is being measured. The survey should ask the respondents whether they felt being unsafe in the last three months, for any reason such as the presence of criminal activity, the incidence of fires, or the onset of floods.
In the dictionary of the government, it appears that it does not differentiate between poverty reduction and poverty alleviation. Poverty reduction means reducing the poverty rate, poverty alleviation means making poverty more bearable. With a poverty rate of at least 50%, what we need is poverty reduction, and not poverty alleviation. Providing poverty alleviation to a sea of poor people is like applying a soothing lotion to an injured patient who needs an operation. We need to set targets as to how much we aim to reduce the poverty rate in due time.
The author is a broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, political economist and computer technologist. He was formerly Director General of the National Computer Center and Chairman of the National Crime Information System
posted by Ike Señeres at 6:00 PM
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