The Department of Social Welfare and Developmet Field Office 5 through the Listahanan will validate the initial list of poor this end of October until November in all barangays in the region.

“The department was able to assess 1,056,722 and subjected to Proxy Means Test (PMT) 1,006,991 households. Of these, 410, 186 were identified as poor.” announced Regional Director Arnel Garcia

For the initial list, Masbate posted the highest percentage in terms of assessed per province with 77,269 or 51.63 % identified poor households out of 149,656, followed by Camarines Sur having 139,750 or 43.10 % out of 324,220, Sorsogon with 56,301 or 38.58 % of 145,916 assessed, Camarines Norte 38,934 or 37.10 % of 104,925, Catanduanes 17,477 or 31.03% of 104,925 and Albay with 80,455 or 34.22% out of 235,076.

According to Garcia the list of poor will change after the validation and finalization phase where the community is given a chance to transparently review the accuracy of the initial list.

The Validation is an activity that provides opportunity for the review of the preliminary list of poor households generated after the initial Proxy Means Test (PMT) and further identifies wrong entries for verification purposes.

“This is also the time for those households who were not enumerated due to the absence of households during the regular enumeration, refusals, and no qualified respondents for them to be assessed. “said Garcia

The initial list of poor will be posted in conspicuous places in the barangays for 5 days. Thereafter queries, appeals and complaints will be entertained by the Listahanan Area Supervisors and will forward to the Local Verification Committee (LVC) for resolution.

The Local Verification Committee (LVC) whose members include the Local Chief Executive, Municipal/City Social Welfare and Development Officer, Municipal/City Planning and Development Officer and two other representatives identified by the LCE.
The grievances/complaints that may be filed are the following;
• An individual claims that a certain household should not be included on the list of poor households (INC 01)
• An individual claims that they are poor and must be included in the list of poor (EX 01)
• An individual claims that they have not been visited by an enumerator for an interview (EX 02)
• An individual complains that interviewer incorrectly entered data in the FAF (ER 01)
• An individual claims that the list is incomplete and not represents the actual poor households in the community (ER 02)
Household assessment will be conducted immediately after consolidating all complaints and appeals to update the record of the households and will re-run to the Proxy Means Test.

After the validation, the official and final list of poor families is shared with data users to serve as their basis in selecting beneficiaries of social protection programs.

Meanwhile, as one of the main stakeholders in the Listahanan implementation, all Municipal Social Welfare and Development Officers (MSWDO’s) in the 6 provinces were gathered for the orientation on all components of the validation and finalization phase on October 13-16 and 20, 2015.

The result of the second round of assessment was presented to them before the conduct of the validation in their respective municipalities. The orientation also served as venue for the feedback generation on the concluded assessment in their areas and planning for the upcoming validation.

The Listahanan formerly known as National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR) is an information management system that aims to establish a database of poor households that will become beneficiaries of social protection programs.