Aquino: CCT successfully lifted families out of poverty

MANDALUYONG CITY, 14 Jan. (PIA)--President Benigno S. Aquino III boasted Conditional Cash Transfer program’s gains, saying it has successfully lifted families out of poverty.

“The preliminary result of the latest round of assessments conducted by our National Household Targeting System, or what we call Listahanan 2, reports that almost 1.55 million CCT families, or over 7.7 million of our countrymen, have been lifted out of poverty,” Aquino said during the conduct of an international conference that discussed the gains of the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program in the Philippines held Wednesday at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) Headquarters in Ortigas Center, Mandaluyong City.

In effect, Aquino said the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) projects the sustained reduction in the country’s poverty incidence in terms of population to anywhere between 18 to 20 percent for 2016 from what used to be 26.3 percent in 2009.

Aquino said the government has taken a giant step forward by directing efforts towards broadening CCT and other poverty alleviation initiatives.

He said that along with key interventions in addressing poverty, the government has increased the budget of the CCT Program from P10 billion in 2010 to P62 billion in 2015.

“This has allowed us to increase the beneficiaries from some 786,000 poor households when we assumed office, to close to 4.4 million poor households and homeless families empowered by the program nationwide, in 5 years,” Aquino said.

“For 2016, we have further increased the budget allocation to P62.7 billion to cover 4.6 million households, including those who have graduated from extreme poverty and are now considered “near poor”—who, while not necessarily poor by definition, are at risk of sliding back to an impoverished state with just one catastrophic disease or a natural disaster,” Aquino added.

During the event, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) President Takehiko Nakao pledged to give an additional $400 million funding to support the government's Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program.

Nakao hailed the implementation of the CCT, saying it helped school children complete their basic and secondary education, and improve their chances of being employed.

The conference was participated by international CCT practitioners, implementers, and beneficiaries of the Pantawid Pamilya program.

Other guests include ADB Country Director Richard Bolt, Australian Embassy Deputy Head of Mission Dr. David Dutton, and Mexico’s former National Coordinator of Oportunidades Rogelio Gomez Hermosillo.

The two-day conference discussed topics on CCT’s impact in the Philippines as well as in other implementing countries. It also tackled the program’s contribution to the economy, governance, and disaster risk reduction. (PIA-NCR/RJB/SDL)