The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has deployed more than 20,000 field staff nationwide to kick-off the 2nd round of assessment of the Listahanan or the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR).

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.
These field staff have been assigned to collect data from families using the traditional paper and pen in rural barangays all over the country.

“We prioritized remote and hard-to-reach areas to ensure that its residents will be included in the database and given an opportunity to benefit from a social protection program or service,” stated DSWD Secretary Corazon Juliano-Soliman.

All households in rural areas will be enumerated, while assessment in urban areas will be done in pockets of poverty or areas in the barangay where clusters of poor reside.

Field staff who will be assigned in these areas will use a mobile device as data collection tool.

Around 27,000 more field staff will be trained and deployed to complete the assessment of 15.3 million households within 11 months.

“Results of this assessment will provide the department an update on the poor households who were identified in the 1st assessment,” Secretary Soliman said.

It may be recalled that in 2009, the DSWD conducted the first assessment which resulted to the identification of 5.2 million poor households out of the 10.9 million assessed.

These households have since become beneficiaries of the Philhealth Indigent Program. Some 4.4 million households have also been enrolled in the Pantawid Pamilya program.

Households are asked to cooperate in the assessment by providing true and accurate information to the enumerators. They may also send their complaints to the DSWD hotline number 0918-9122813 if they have observed irregularities in the conduct of the assessment. ###