The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) through the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR) or Listahanan is currently conducting tablet-aided enumeration in identified pockets of poverty in 9,997 urban barangays nationwide.

The use of the mobile device as a data collection tool is among the Department’s innovations for the 2nd round of assessment.

“These tablet devices will expedite the assessment process in urban areas since they can automatically sync accomplished electronic family assessment forms (FAF) directly to the server,” Secretary Soliman said.

To ensure the quality of data that will be synced to the server, the Listahanan installed validation routines to its mobile application, causing error messages to appear whenever enumerators encode inconsistent and incomplete data.

Aside from that, quality-control measures are also being implemented at the field level.

Area supervisors re-interview households whose names appear in a system-generated list of those assessed using mobile devices. This is to check the consistency and accuracy of the data gathered by enumerators.

The DSWD also conducts unannounced spot checks to ensure the compliance of the field staff to the assessment protocols and guidelines.

Around 11,000 enumerators are being hired and deployed to cover the target of 5.6 million families in urban areas.

Listahanan is an information management system that identifies who and where the poor are. It makes available to national government agencies and other social protection stakeholders a socio-economic database as basis for identifying beneficiaries of their programs and services. ### (Listahanan Social Marketing Unit)