The World Bank said countries in the Asia and the Pacific could look to the Philippines’s Conditional Cash-Transfer
(CCT) Program as a model to boost their social-protection systems to better prepare and respond to disasters.
The Washington-based lender said better social-protection systems will likely boost recovery efforts in disaster-affected areas, especially in Asia and the Pacific which is prone to disaster and climate risks.
“The Philippines provides a rich experience for other countries facing similar challenges with disaster and climate risks. It is encouraging to see the government’s commitment to this agenda and to continually improve its existing social-protection systems by making it resilient to disaster, while ensuring that it responds rapidly to the consequences of disasters,” World Bank Country Director for the Philippines Motoo Konishi said.
“To do this, the Department of Social Welfare and Development [DSWD] has converged its three flagship programs—conditional cash transfer, community-driven development and livelihood support—to make them an effective tool in making households more resilient to disasters,” he added.
Social Welfare Secretary Corazon “Dinky” Soliman said Supertyphoon Yolanda, which struck Central Philippines a year ago on November 13, 2013, was a game changer, especially in social protection.
Soliman said that in the wake of Yolanda, the DSWD was able to mobilize social services and other government assistance through the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction used in identifying CCT recipients.
In this way, the national government was able to combine CCTs with disaster risk-management tools and were able to immediately enroll the affected CCT recipients for emergency-employment programs and other
post-disaster programs.
“The typhoon was a game changer; it tested the resiliency of our people and stretched the government disaster-response system and social-protection structures to the limit,” Soliman said.
“The database of the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction helped us in identifying families that could be enrolled for various rehabilitation programs, such as the cash-for-work and cash-for-asset rebuilding,” she added.
The World Bank said that countries can better respond to the needs of the poor and disaster-affected communities by linking social-protection programs and disaster-reduction management efforts.
The bank said it is important for countries to also provide the technical infrastructure needed to bring help to communities that have been or are prone to being affected by disasters.
These technical infrastructure include national identification systems, linkages between existing targeting systems and disaster response, data management systems for delivery of cash and kind benefits, and information technology tools.