The Philippine Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) is among the top 5 largest conditional cash-transfer (CCT) programs in the world in terms of scale, according to a report released by the World Bank.
The report titled “The State of Social Safety Nets 2015” cited that the 4Ps has around 19 million beneficiaries ranking it fourth worldwide in terms of scale. There are 63 countries with CCT programs globally.
Compared to last year’s “State of Social Safety Net,” the Philippines ranked third out of the 52 countries with CCT. Last year the World Bank said some 20 million Filipinos benefited from the 4Ps.
The largest CCT program worldwide is the Janani Suraksha Yojana in India with 78 million beneficiaries, followed by the Bolsa Familia in Brazil with 49 million, and Prospera with 26 million. Rounding up the top 5 CCT programs in terms of scale is Familias en Accion in Colombia with 12 million beneficiaries.
“Conditional cash transfers are the best targeted safety-net programs, devoting as much as 50 percent of benefits to the poorest 20 percent of the population. This is evident in the case of large-scale conditional cash-transfer programs in Latin America [such as Bolsa Familia in Brazil and Prospera in Mexico] and more recently, established programs in Asia [such as the Pantawid in the Philippines],” the World Bank said in a news statement.
The World Bank said the 4Ps account for 67 percent of the country’s budget, significantly higher than the average of 16 percent in the East Asia region.
Further, the Philippines’s universal health-care program extended by Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) was also cited by the World Bank as the third-largest fee waivers, another social safety-net category. The PhilHealth program covers as much as 39 million Filipinos.
The two countries that offer the two largest fee waivers are Indonesia and China whose fee-waiver programs cover 86 million and 42 million, respectively.
The PhilHealth program was the world’s third-biggest fee-waiver program in terms of beneficiaries share of total population. The World Bank estimated that it covers as much as 40 percent of the country’s population.
However, the World Bank said that despite the scale of these programs, the Philippines’s spending on social safety-net programs are still below the average of 1.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
“The combined spending on social safety nets in 120 developing countries amounted to about $329 billion between 2010 and 2014. Well-designed programs are cost-effective, costing countries only between 1.5 percent and 1.9 percent of GDP—far less than most government spending on fuel subsidies,” the World Bank said.
As of March 2015, government data showed there were 4.43 million households who were enrolled under the 4Ps. Around of which 558,609 are indigenous households and 223,344 have at least one person with disability, and 11.06 million schoolchildren aged 0 to 18.
Health grants are given at P500 every month per household, amounting to P6,000 annually, while education grants of P300 every month for 10 months are given per child, amounting to P3,000 every year.
Beneficiaries of the program were selected through the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction, came from all 17 regions in the Philippines that included 79 provinces, 143 cities and 1,484 municipalities.
According to The State of Social Safety Nets 2015, more than 1.9 billion people in 136 low- and middle-income countries are now on beneficiary rolls of social safety-net programs.
In Africa alone, the number of countries setting up social safety- net programs has doubled over the past three years, as evidenced by rigorous evaluations that prove these programs work.
But three quarters of the poorest people in low- and lower-middle-income countries, and more than one-third of the poorest people in middle-income countries, lack safety-net coverage and remain at risk.
The report follows the recent joint statement by the heads of the World Bank Group and the International Labor Organization, endorsing the goal of universal access to social protection—including safety nets—by 2030.
The Third Financing for Development Conference in Addis Ababa next week is an opportunity to ensure that the international community has the means to make this vision a reality.
(With Janine Marie D. Soliman)