ILOILO CITY – The regional office of the Department of Social Welfare and Development here announces that it is now hiring at least 4,525 field staff to work for the second round of assessment of poor households in September.

The project, which will be implemented by the National Household Targeting Unit under DSWD, will need 110 area coordinators, 553 area supervisors and 2,758 enumerators who will saturate the entire Western Visayas to assess some 1.3 million poor families. In addition,  1,104 encoders and verifiers will also be hired to do the encoding and verification of the data that will be saved in the database.

To qualify as area coordinators and area supervisors, applicants must be Bachelor’s Degree in Social Science or any related course, must have at least two years experience in a supervisory role, must possess excellent communications and writing skills, should have experience in conflict resolution/mediation work and must be computer literate with knowledge and skills on Microsoft Office.

For enumerators, they must have completed at least two years in college, should have good interviewing and communication skills, must be residents of the municipality where they will be assigned, computer literate with knowledge and skills on Microsoft Office and must have initiative to learn and contribute to the success of the project.

Meanwhile, applicants for encoders and verifiers should have completed at least two years in college or any IT-related courses, must have initiative to learn and contribute to the success of the project and must have an encoding speed of at least 35 words per minute.

Those who are interested to apply are advised to submit their application letter and comprehensive resume to the nearest City, Municipal, or Provincial Social Welfare and Development Offices in their areas or to the Department of Social Welfare and Development Field Office VI.

The deadline for submission of applications will be on August 9, 2013.

According to Trinidad Lopez, Regional Focal Person of the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR), those who will be hired for the above positions will undergo intensive training before they will be deployed to the field for the actual conduct of the assessment.

Field enumerators will be using Household Assessment Forms (HAF) in collecting data during their house-to-house enumeration of poor households. The date collected will then go through Proxy Means Test for poor and non-poor identification. PMT is a statistical formula that estimates the income of households based on the proxy variables included in the HAF.

The first cycle of household assessment was done in 2009 wherein 385,516 of the 986,640 assessed households were identified as living below the poverty threshold.

The database of these identified poor households is used in prioritizing beneficiaries for anti-poverty programs./DSWD6/Wenna Berondo-Bendol