The government should consider slowing down the implementation of the PantawidPamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) to make sure only the poor benefit from it, a poverty expert said.
This may provide the government the needed breather to fine-tune the program’s targeting mechanism, among others, plugging the leaks in the process, said Nanak Kakwani, poverty expert from the University of New South Wales, during a seminar at the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) recently.
“You have to slowdown the program because you are still learning,” Kakwani added, citing the country’s “rather fast” attempt to replicate Bolsa Familia, Brazil’s social welfare program.
This was not the first time someone advised the government to adopt a go-slow approach on 4Ps.
In a 2015 study, PIDS president Celia Reyes also urged the government to deepen rather than expand the coverage of 4Ps, after learning it was suffering from a 29 percent leakage rate.
This means roughly three in every 10 of its beneficiaries are not poor and do not even deserve to be part of the program.
In a report, the Commission on Audit (COA) also prodded the government to suspend the expansion of its flagship poverty alleviation program until the leakages are plugged.
Despite these recommendations, 4Ps still saw rapid expansion under the Aquino administration in its attempt to boost the “mass registration” of the program, according to COA.
