More than 12,000  individuals’ poverty status will be assessed through the Listahanan or National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR) of the Department of Social Welfare and Development in Eastern Visayas.

The Listahanan or NHTS-PR is an information management system that identifies “who” and “where” the poor households are  in the country. The tool allows the identification of eligible beneficiaries to DSWD’s social protection programs and its stakeholders.

A region-wide poverty-status validation of existing unregistered social pension recipients will be conducted in the second quarter of 2014.

This will also verify the social pensioners who perished due to typhoon Yolanda in November 2013.

The validation will also determine families in need of special protection.These families will be included in the Listahanan database and will become  recipients of the regular Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program of the DSWD.

143 Local Government Units (LGUs) from Region 8 will participate in the special validation process.  Socio-economic and household member information will be collected from the residents of these municipalities.

“We request the full cooperation of the LGUs and the residents of the region as this will ensure that quality data will be collected during the validation. This will allow the department to update  the NHTS-PR database and improve its services to the region,”, says Yvonne Serrano-Abonales, the Deputy Regional Project Manager of the Listahanan or NHTS-PR.

DSWD strives for   better, smarter and faster delivery of services to the poor through regular field validation of its database.