From challenges to changes
To embrace it with optimism is what the 33-year-old Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program beneficiary Atiya Enting Jumdail always does whenever she faces a new challenge on her life. She says that every challenge that comes her way brings a perfect opportunity to learn through change. To her, learning through challenges is a strategy that has long helped her through the countless trials that she experienced ever since she and his husband started their lives together. Atiya has been married for ...
CCT program still a work in progress
GENERAL SANTOS CITY: The government’s Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program is still a work in progress and its implementor, the Department of Social Welfare and Development, does not pretend to claim that it is being smoothly implemented. Overall, however, the program is seen as a success since the poorest of the poor are saved from hunger while their children receive health care and go to elementary and secondary schools. Edward Gonzales, chief of DSWD social marketing office, said families who ...
Rising from ‘poorest of the poor’ in T’Boli
Farmer Johnny Tolentino recalls how he was barely surviving hand-to-mouth when he first received five years ago the P4,000 cash assistance from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) under its Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps). “You can’t imagine,” the 43-year-old man said. “What we needed to eat for lunch, we still needed to earn at breakfast.” Tolentino was planting only okra and other vegetables in a half-a-hectare lot that a municipal official in T’boli, South Cotabato province, had ...
Pantawid Pamilya inspires violence-free communities
We are no stranger to horrible accounts of violence committed against women and children. Heart- breaking narratives of wives being beaten to death by their jealous husbands and children raped by the people who should be protecting them are sometimes trivialized as nothing extraordinary but a matter of the family. Violence against women and children (VAWC) happens every day and across culture. There is a wide spectrum of gender-based violence wherein women and girls are vulnerable to. These include trafficking, ...
Toward ‘better’ families
Subic- Leonie Nervida, 47, lives in a tiny, two-room apartment that lies at the end of a row of similarly small apartments in Barangay New Banicain in this city. She shares the single bedroom with her husband Francisco (“Nanie”) who, at 60, is 13 years older than she. They have eight children (“I had three children when he met me,” Leonie says, “but he accepted them fully and treated them, like the ones we had together, as his own”), only ...
