By keeping true to this year’s thrust in intensifying family and community risk reduction and preparedness, the DSWD Field Office Eight started training the first batch of implementers of the PANTAWID PAMILYANG PILIPINO PROGRAM (PANTAWID PAMILYA), on Family and Community Disaster Preparedness (FCDP), August 13 till August 15, at the Milka Hotel in Tacloban City. It will be a series of training for the four batches, each composing of 120 participants, specifically Municipal and City links and Social Welfare Assistants.

The main goal is to equip the workers with the knowledge and skills on disaster preparedness such that Family and Community Disaster Preparedness becomes part of the topic in Family Development Sessions (FDS).

DSWD Field Office Eight Director disclosed that the FDS, which is conducted monthly, is one of the program conditionalities, for beneficiaries to be eligible for the health/nutrition and education cash grants.

“They belong to the poorest of the poor. Hence, they are vulnerable to the damaging effects of disasters”. Diokno further reported.

She also revealed that the PANTAWID PAMILYA beneficiaries have all the programs and services directed on them, so as to hasten the improvement of their lives. “The 220,000 household – beneficiaries that we have now, were carefully selected through a scientific means, via the agency’s National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTSPR),” Diokno pointed out.

The NHTSPR is a system of identifying who and where the poor are. The idea is to formulate a unified and standard criteria for the identification of the poorest families in order to reduce the leakage or inclusion of the non-poor and under-coverage/exclusion of the poor in social protection services

“We want them to be empowered… from a state of survival to a level of self sufficiency. This means that they will be able to rise above difficulties, such as a disaster,” She said.