World Bank OKs $300M loan for PHL's Conditional Cash Transfer Program

The World Bank on Friday said it has approved a $300-million loan to provide additional funding for the Philippines' Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps).

In a statement, the multilateral lender said its board of executive directors has approved the funding for the 4Ps — a conditional cash transfer program currently benefiting 4.2 million families, including 8.7 million children.

The new funding from the World Bank will finance cash transfers to poor families for a period of two years as well as help combat malnutrition and promote early childhood development, WB said.

It will also provide technical assistance to the Philippine government to help strengthen implementation and impact, including more efficient payment systems, monitoring and evaluation, and family development sessions, it added.

President Rodrigo Duterte has recently signed Republic Act No. 11310, which institutionalizes the 4Ps and providing higher cash subsidies for all beneficiaries.

The law aims to “break the inter-generational cycle of poverty through investment in human capital and improvement of delivery of basic services to the poor, particularly education, health and nutrition.”

The annual budget for the 4Ps is $1.7 billion.

The additional funding from the World Bank will cover 9% of the 4Ps budget through June 2022, the lender said.

The 4Ps 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.

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.

“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,” Mara Warwick, World Bank country director for Brunei, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand, said.

“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,” Warwick said.

Implemented in 145 cities and 1,483 municipalities in the Philippines, the 4Ps is responsible for a quarter of total poverty reduction in the country, according to the World Bank 2018 Poverty Assessment.

Other achievements of the program include:

• A 4.9% increase in enrollment among children 12-17 years old from a baseline of 80.4%

• A 10% increase in enrollment among children 16-17 years old from a baseline of 60.8%

• 30% reduction in the enrollment gap between boys and girls ages 6-14

• Increased access by poor women to maternal and child health services such as antenatal care.

Of the total number of active beneficiary households, 41% are from Luzon, 21% from Visayas, and 38% from Mindanao, with the largest number of beneficiaries coming from the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).

Around 15% of the beneficiaries are members of indigenous communities.

Over the last decade, the Philippines has undertaken significant steps to build its social protection system, the World Bank said.

Besides the 4Ps, the government is updating the national household targeting system (Listahanan), it said.

The Philippines has also expanded its social pension program, and has provided livelihood opportunities for the poor, including food and other subsidies to compensate for higher inflation, and it is promoting use of cash transfers to respond to natural disasters, according to the lender.

The World Bank said it has been supporting 4Ps over the last decade.

In 2016, the lender approved a $450-million funding to help finance the health and education grants for CCT beneficiaries from 2016 to 2019, covering about 7% of the total cost of the program’s implementation. —KBK, GMA News