MALATE, MANILA – The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) Field Office MiMaRoPa, through the Listahanan, targets 5,652 senior citizens for the house-to-house interviews aimed at validating the poverty status of Social Pension recipients across five island provinces in MiMaRoPa.

This number comprised of 2,104 poor senior citizens in Palawan, 1,774 in Oriental Mindoro, 800 in Occidental Mindoro, 693 in Romblon and 281 in Marinduque province.

The said validation adheres to the Department’s goal of reducing inclusion of non-poor in social protection programs such as the Social Pension for Indigent Senior Citizen Program. Social Pension is a DSWD program that provides PhP500.00 monetary assistance per month to indigent senior citizens aged 77 years old and above.

Thirty (30) Enumerators, six (6) Area Supervisors and six (6) Encoders will be hired to administer the special validation. They will be using the Family Assessment Form (FAF), a questionnaire with 46 variables that collect family welfare information. The data gathered will be subjected to Proxy Means Test (PMT), a statistical tool that determines if a family is poor or not. ### (Written by Jason Eco Oliverio, DSWD Field Office IV-A)