The Department of Social Welfare and Development Field Office VI (DSWD 6) will be providing emergency cash assistance to more families in Western Visayas through its Social Amelioration Program (SAP).

Regional Director Ma. Evelyn Macapobre said five million additional families who were not included in the initial 18 million family beneficiaries in the country will now receive the cash aid from the government.

“Dahil po nakinig ang gobyerno sa inyong mga apila. Ito po ay pagkakataon na yung mga hindi napasama sa unang SAP ay mabayaran natin,” she stressed.

For Western Visayas, the number of additional families who will receive SAP is yet to be determined pending the submission of names from the LGUs.

She said the local government units (LGUs) will be solely responsible in identifying eligible families to be included in the additional list of SAP beneficiaries, based on Memorandum Circular No. 14, series of 2020.

Included in the additional families are those eligible families who were not included in the first tranche due to limited funds.

Macapobre said families of Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) beneficiaries who were tagged as moved out in the Pantawid database before January 16, 2020 can also be included on the left-out list.

Families in the 4Ps roster that were not provided with SAP on the first tranche due to late registration, late reactivation of household, late submission of documentary attachments and updates, newly registered replacement households, and modified conditional cash transfer households excluded during the matching validation procedure are also eligible.

The new guidelines also allow senior citizens receiving P6,000 pension and below to receive SAP.

She emphasized that for couples, their combined pension should not go beyond P6,000 to be eligible.

Those who are engaged by the government and are only receiving allowances or honorarium below P6,000 can also be qualified for SAP.

They include barangay tanods, day care workers, barangay health workers and barangay nutrition scholars, as stated on the guidelines.

Macapobre said the LGUs are given until June 9 to submit their list of left-out beneficiaries.

She said once the LGUs have submitted their list of left-out families at the field office, it will be subject for duplicity check at the regional and inter-regional level.

The deduplication process entails the cross-matching of the list with the available database of the DSWD and other agencies implementing SAP.

After the duplicity check, a certified list of eligible additional beneficiaries for SAP will then be generated and may also be submitted to the Department of Finance for further validation, said Macapobre.

Meanwhile, as of 12NN of Monday, June 8, the agency was already able to provide P8.2 billion SAP grants to more than 1.45 million families in the region.

Among them are the 1,130,589 non-conditional cash transfer beneficiaries and 321,747 families who are members of 4Ps.

The non-CCT beneficiaries received P6,000 SAP assistance from DSWD thru their LGUs while the 4Ps received P4,650 as top up on their monthly rice subsidy of P600 and P750 health grant.

The agency was able to provide P6,783,534,000 for non-CCT beneficiaries and P1,496,123,550 for 4Ps familes.#dswd6