QUEZON CITY, (PIA) -- At least 750,000 new beneficiaries have been added to the list of Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) in place of the 800,000 that were previously removed recently, according to Social Welfare Secretary Rex Gatchalian.

"There are 750,000 people who will replace them recorded in the last database, the Listahanan 2019-2020," Gatchalian said Friday, Feb.10, in an interview with GMA News.

It can be recalled that around 1.3 million beneficiaries of the program are subject to revalidation because the list is outdated, or it means that maybe some of them can no longer be considered poor.

Since the appointment of Gatchalian, a former mayor and representative of Valenzuela City, he said he will focus on adjusting the list of beneficiaries in the various programs of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).

Despite this, Gatchalian said that it will stop creating its own database for the beneficiaries and they will depend only on the database of the Philippines Statistics Authority (PSA), according to the Community-Based Monitoring System law.

"It is stated in the law that, by the end of this year, no other database will be used other than the CBMS database, so it will be unified," he said.

Gatchalian and National Statistician and PSA chief Claire Dennis Mapa are currently talking about the matter.
The DSWD and PSA called on lawmakers to fund the agency so that the database will be completed by the end of 2023. (PIA-NCR)