Legaspi City- The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) Field Office V through the National Household Targeting Section (NHTS) announced that the third round of Listahanan validation and finalization phase is nearing its completion.

DSWD Regional Director Leo L. Quintilla said that as of January 20, 2022, the encoding and verification activities of the remaining 184,577 household assessment forms (HAFs) were already completed.

Relative to this, the initial list of poor households will undergo a stringent data cleansing and deduplication process to ensure that all its information are correct, complete, and reliable.

After this course, all the verified and cleansed HAFs will be endorsed anew for Proxy Means Test (PMT) processing to be able to produce the final list of poor in the region.

PMT is a statistical model that approximates family income and is compared to the existing provincial poverty threshold set by the Philippine Statistics Authority. Households whose income are above the threshold are tagged as non-poor while household with income falling below the threshold are classified poor.

Further, DSWD emphasized that the inclusion to Listahanan does not guarantee any provision of cash aid or automatic inclusion to any program of the government.

The data that will be generated by the program will be used by national government agencies (NGAs), local government units (LGUs), non-government organizations (NGOs), and other institutions as their reference for beneficiary selection to ensure that only qualified poor households will be prioritized for poverty alleviation programs and other appropriate interventions.

The final database of poor household is expected to be released in the early quarter of 2022. ###