By Jason de Asis

SENATE OFFICE, Manila, November 10, 2010-Senator Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan says that the government’s P21 billion cash transfer fund is a cornerstone of PNoy’s poverty alleviation program that they have to support in order to fulfill the President’s campaign.

The Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program should be supported to heal the root cause of poverty where the house-of-representatives had passed the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s budget for the cash transfer program without cuts and the bill is set to deliver in the upper chamber this week, saying that Pangilinan will observe closely how the program will be implemented by DSWD.

He said that they need to come up with long-term solutions to alleviate poverty in the country. For now, we must follow through on the promise of improving the lives of our countrymen, and the CCT program is an important first step in addressing poverty head on.

It was stated in the Conditional Cash Transfer Programs that as effective tools for poverty alleviation a 2008 study by Hyun H. Son published by the Asian Development Bank, stressing that CCT programs are increasingly perceived as tools for poverty alleviation, have been highly successful in Latin American countries, and increasingly perceived as a magic bullet for poverty reduction.

Successful CCT programs are found in Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua, Honduras, Jamaica, Bangladesh, and Chile, however there is no guarantee that the success of CCT programs in some countries can be replicated in others, they provide an important example that can yield an array of good practices from which other countries can learn.

Some of the issues that were identified to be crucial in the success of a CCT program are cash transfers without conditionality will not be sufficient to increase human capital outcomes significantly and good governance and political support at high levels for the program play an important role in implementing it.

The implementation of the CCT program will put to test the government's mantra of “Kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap”, where the Senator said that a properly implemented program that is not tainted by corruption will be the country's first step toward addressing the pervasive poverty problem. (Jason de Asis)