CBMS seeks to build database to plug leakages in social protection programs
THE national government aims to stop leakages in local and national social protection programs through the institutionalization of the Community-based Monitoring System (CBMS).
On Monday at the launch of the CBMS, Senator Sherwin Gatchalian said the lack of granular data has always stumped local politicians in terms of targeting their projects and programs for their constituents.
As a result and to cope with the lack of granular data on where their constituents are, what they need, and how much is needed to respond in their respective locales, they would implement a “shotgun” approach when providing assistance.
“Ngayon kasi it’s really, shotgun. There are so many leakages with the shotgun approach,” Gatchalian said. “The CBMS is really meant for local governmentstouse[intheirprojects].”
Gatchalian said the shotgun approach involves allocating funds for specific projects and programs. They would often put barangay heads to task to distribute the assistance to their constituents and hope that these will later lead to some change in the lives of communities.
With the institutionalization of the CBMS under the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), Gatchalian said, local government units (LGU) could already dispense of the shotgun approach and rely on the CBMS for localized information.
National Statistician Claire Dennis S. Mapa said the CBMS intends to generate granular data, particularly those that would help in creating the multidimensional poverty index (MPI) as well as monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS).
The CBMS would specifically collect data on the health and nutrition situation in households; type of housing structure; household’s access to water and sanitation; education; literacy; community participation; and sources of livelihoods, among other socioeconomic development indicators.
“The information that will be gathered will include the demographic characteristics and various aspects of life and living conditions of households in the country,” Mapa said.
“This is one of the goals of the CBMS—TO know the different realities in each community. These types of information help form a picture of each community, the kind of government interventions needed and the households and individuals most needing assistance,” he stressed.
Over 600 cities and municipalities nationwide have signed on to be part of the first CBMS. Mapa said that the CBMS, once completed, could already be used by LGUS in the creation of their local plans and the conduct of programs.
As a database, the CBMS could be used as basis even for national programs such as the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program. The existing database for cities and municipalities who are not yet part of the CBMS could still be used, however.
Earlier, a report of Socialwatch and Oxfam found that the Covid-19 social protection programs financed through loans from the Asian Development
Bank (ADB), Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB), and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) excluded millions of Filipinos and small businesses during the lockdowns.
The report stated that the exclusion from three key social protection programs was due to “red tape” and the focus on the assistance for formal sector participants.
The programs were the Covid-19 Adjustment Measures Program (CAMP) for workers through the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE); Small Business Wage Subsidy (SBWS) for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMES) through the Social Security System (SSS) and the Department of Finance (DOF); and the Social Amelioration Program (SAP) under the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).
The findings showed at least 842,014 families received duplicate assistance under the SAP. These families were identified after they were cross-matched with databases of the DSWD’S Emergency Subsidy Program and Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps).
In terms of the SBWS, the report found that the program was only able to reach 146,000 MSMES and 3.59 million workers. This meant the program barely reached 15 percent of its goal.
The report found that CAMP turned away nearly a million workers by the end of the application period in mid-april 2020. Socialwatch and Oxfam noted that this was a time when wage earners struggled with income losses daily.