by CHE DE LOS REYES
Residents of a barangay in Metro Manila search for their names on the latest shortlist of beneficiaries of the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) Program posted by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). PHOTO/Che de los Reyes
SHE HAD neither bought a lotto ticket nor joined a TV game show. But Marissa felt like she won the jackpot anyway late last year, when her family was chosen as one of the recipients of the government’s Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) Program.
After all, it meant her family would be receiving P800 a month, and while that has since proved inadequate to sustain her brood of four, whatever cash she can lay her hands on is welcome, especially now that her husband, a returnee from suddenly protest-prone Saudi Arabia, has been jobless for the last two months.
Since 2007, some 1.4 million poor households have been selected to receive regular cash grants from the government under the CCT. By the end of this year, the government wants to increase the figure to 2.3 million families.
In the next five years, the government will be enrolling even more families in the CCT; by the time President Benigno Simeon ‘Noynoy’ C. Aquino III’s term ends in 2016, up to 4.6 million poor families would have been covered by the program.
That is the promise of the Aquino government, according to Social Welfare and Development Secretary Corazon ‘Dinky’ Soliman, the CCT’s national program director. But the Philippine Development Plan for 2011 to 2016 – that the government finally released last May 26 – puts the total CCT target-beneficiaries at only 4.3 million by 2016, or 300,000 fewer families.