The Philippines secured a fresh $300-million worth loan from the World Bank for the government’s Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program.
In a statement on Friday, World Bank said the new funding will finance the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) for a period of two years.
The annual budget for the 4Ps is $1.7 billion. The additional funding from the World Bank will cover 9 percent of the 4Ps budget through June 2022.
“This additional financing shows the World Bank’s continuing commitment to the country’s social protection program as it grows with greater sophistication to tackle a broader array of development concerns, including child malnutrition,” said Mara K. Warwick, World Bank Country Director for Brunei, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand. “Since 2008, the 4Ps has promoted safer birth deliveries and has improved poor children’s access to educational and health services. We are proud to support programs such as this that help millions of families overcome poverty.”
The new loan will address malnutrition and promote early childhood development. It will also help the government strengthen the implementation and impact, including more efficient payment systems, monitoring and evaluation, and family development sessions.
For his part, Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ernesto M. Pernia told BusinessMirror that the loan will be used efficiently for the CCTs. Earlier, a study by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) found that the leakage rate of the program is about 30 percent.
The government’s budget for CCTs at that time was at P44 billion which meant the government was wasting some P12 billion on those considered non-poor. The PIDS study said this can be used to cover the higher costs needed to support older children.
“The government has put in place additional controls and safeguards are being put in place (to address these leakages),” Pernia said on Friday.
The 4Ps is a conditional cash transfer program currently benefiting 4.2 million families, including 8.7 million children. It provides cash grants to poor families to ensure that children stay healthy and in school, thus reducing school dropout rates, discouraging child labor, and enabling them to break free from poverty in adulthood.
Further, pregnant mothers receiving grants are required to get pre- and post-natal checks to help ensure safe motherhood. Parents attend “family development sessions” where they strengthen their knowledge of child care and are empowered to demand better and expanded social services from the government.
Implemented in 145 cities and 1,483 municipalities in the country, the 4Ps is responsible for a quarter of total poverty reduction in the country, according to the World Bank 2018 Poverty Assessment.
Other achievements include a 4.9 percent increase in enrollment among children 12-17 years old from a baseline of 80.4 percent and a 10 percent increase in enrollment among children 16-17 years old from a baseline of 60.8 percent.
The World Bank also said the program was responsible for the 30 percent reduction in the enrollment gap between boys and girls ages 6-14 and increased access by poor women to maternal and child health services such as antenatal care.
Of the total number of active beneficiary households, 41 percent are from Luzon, 21 percent from Visayas, and 38 percent from Mindanao, with the largest number of beneficiaries coming from the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (BARMM). Around 15 percent of the beneficiaries are members of indigenous communities.
Recently, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte signed Republic Act 11310, institutionalizing the 4Ps and providing higher cash subsidies for all beneficiaries. The law aims to “break the intergenerational cycle of poverty through investment in human capital and improvement of delivery of basic services to the poor, particularly education, health and nutrition.”
