DSWD nears completion of households’ assessments in Region 9

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(PNA), FFC/TPGJR

ZAMBOANGA CITY, Aug. 14 (PNA) -– The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has already assessed 87 percent covering 601,195 of the 688,495 estimated households here in Region 9.

Pilar Francisco, deputy regional project manager for Listahanan, said the assessment is expected to be completed by the end of this month and initial results will be available.

“The initial results will be posted in all barangays in the entire region. The community in each barangay can check whether their household is classified as poor or non-poor,” Francisco said.

Francisco said households with estimated incomes that are equal to and above the latest provincial poverty thresholds are considered non-poor and those with estimated incomes falling below the poverty thresholds are considered poor.

She said the identification of poor and non-poor households is done in an objective, systematic and transparent manner through an application called the Proxy Means Test (PMT) that is managed by the National Information Technology Office based at the central office of DSWD.

The PMT is a statistical model that estimates the income of a household based on the variables that are tested to be good predictors of income.

Francisco said the PMT used in the 2009 household assessment was enhanced to produce accurate and reliable results in order to secure a better targeting system.

Francisco said that improvements made in the new model--such as inclusion of barangay characteristics as one of the determinants of poverty status and the installation of a second stage screener to weed out possible inclusion errors--resulted to a decrease in model-based error rates, from having an inclusion and exclusion error rates of 22-35 percent in the 2009 model to 6.9-19.3 percent in the new model.

She said that a Local Verification Committee will be formed to receive and act on complaints and appeals from the community should there be questions and complaints in the initial list of poor households.

“This further decreases possibility of having an inclusion and exclusion error in the database,” she added.

The second round of household assessment is spearheaded by the Listahanan, an information management system that identifies who and where the poor are in the country.

Listahanan is formerly known as the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NTHS-PR).