Scrutinizing the CCTs

Our latest offering is a three-part report scrutinizes the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) or Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), “the cornerstone of the government’s strategy to fight poverty and attain” the Millennium Development Goals that the Philippines has pledged to achieve by 2015. On this massive, multi-year, multi-billion-peso program, President Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III has anchored his epic battle against poverty in the land.

A continuation of a program initiated by Aquino’s immediate predecessor, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the CCT is expected to provide a safety net that will keep segments of the poor from sliding to deeper penury. By the time Aquino bows out of the presidency in 2016, the CCT should have served – at least on paper – from 4.3 million to 4.6 million Filipino families, in large measure using loans from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.

Today “the world’s favorite new anti-poverty device,” CCTs have been differently funded and implemented in virtually all the countries of Latin America and some in Asia and other continents since 1995.

While development scholars have affirmed the good if short-term outcomes that CCTs could trigger (i.e., better school-enrollment ratios and improved health status of the children), they have also expressed concern over the long-term impact and benefits of costly CCT programs, especially if these are not complemented by real, massive spending to ramp up the quantity and quality of education and health services, as well as job-generation and livelihood-training programs for the poor, adult population.

Too, they have also warned that sustainability could become a serious problem once the funds run out and there is no all-sided strategy against poverty in place.

Indeed, the CCT has served as a public-relations handle of the Aquino government’s war on poverty. But it is one built on the flawed spin or fallacy that it is a program for all the poor in the Philippines.

Six months of the PCIJ’s research and review of relevant documents, and interviews with relevant sources on the CCT reveal that:

• The CCT is a focused, time-bound initiative only for poor Filipino families who would pass the computer-generated targeting of beneficiaries under a “proxy means test,” and then would have to comply with strict program conditionalities. Under these terms, the poorest of the poor, notably the “food poor” and the most destitute that walk the streets and do not belong to typical “family” units, are not the targets of the CCT.
• The decision to expand and accelerate the program was made without adequate due diligence in assessing supply-side, implementation, and program delivery requirements. The program’s target beneficiaries have been increased seven-fold from 2008 to this year even without a full assessment of the availability, quantity, and quality of education and health services in all CCT areas, or even before a comprehensive evaluation of the program’s first phase under the Arroyo administration could be made.
• Billions of pesos have also been allotted for personnel and administrative systems to monitor the beneficiaries’ compliance (demand side) with CCT conditions, even as there remains no vigorous parallel monitoring of how national and local government agencies will comply with their obligations to deliver on education and health services (supply side) that the CCT promises.
• The lead agency for the CCT, the Department of Social Welfare ad Development (DSWD), is now under intense pressure to accomplish its tasks related to the program, along with its regular duties. To cope with the rushed and expanded implementation of the program, DSWD is hiring, training, and deploying some 2,300 ground monitors (called ‘municipal links’ and ‘community links’ in project documents) at frenetic speed. As budgeted in its 2011 agency appropriation, the DSWD could actually spend up to P4 million on CCT-related “training” activities alone, every day.
• The DSWD has yet to complete its Supply-Side Assessment (SSA) in 320 of the 729 cities and municipalities that have been enrolled as “CCT areas” as of November 2010, but thus far, the results are way too tragic. Of the 409 CCT towns and cities audited, an overwhelming majority are not meeting seven of the nine quantity benchmarks for education, and all three benchmarks for health personnel ratios to population.
• On the ground, the picture has become quite complicated. Under the General Appropriations Act of 2011, the CCT funds must be directly deposited to government depository banks, and directly accessed by the beneficiaries. “No DSWD employee/officer, CCT secretariat and local government official shall directly handle funds intended for cash grant,” the law says. But because the Land Bank of the Philippines, the CCT fund depository bank, has no branches in many CCT areas, the DSWD has lately enrolled pawnshops and mobile cash-transfer outlets to serve as distribution centers of the cash grants.
• Some beneficiaries are now raising queries about the program, with some expressing doubt that they would be able to comply with the conditions that come with the CCT grants. Others are pointing to unexplained bulk disbursements that have been followed by delayed payouts as signs that the system is still far from being efficient. Thousands of poor families are also wondering why they were left out and if there is a chance for them to be included in the program in the future.

Part 1 of our report looks at the gaps and implementation hurdles that now confront the scaled up and expanded CCT under the Aquino administration. Its Sidebar reveals details of the budget for the CCT, as well as three other “Pantawid” programs that the government has launched for other impoverished sectors.