Has 4Ps worked for the poor?
After nearly two decades of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program, known widely by its initials 4Ps, or Pantawid, it is well worth asking: has it helped reduce poverty among Filipinos? Pantawid is the Philippine version of what’s internationally known as a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program, which was already working in Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and even New York City when we first piloted it in 2007. Having shown positive results elsewhere, it has been actively promoted, financed, and evaluated by the World Bank (WB) through the years.
As the generic name indicates, 4Ps is a cash grant tied to conditions. The main condition, simply put, is that the recipient family invest in their children through regular school attendance, vaccination and health checkups, maternal and early childcare for mothers, and attendance by parents of family development sessions. It is, in effect, an incentive and reward for investing in the family’s future through their children. With the limited size of the cash grant (a family could get up to P4,200 a month, but the average 4Ps family would probably be getting around P2,000-P3,000), it will not necessarily lift them out of poverty directly, but will surely make a difference in the future when the children finish schooling and find productive occupations. The ultimate goal is to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty common in the Filipino poor.
I recently wrote about the government’s social protection (SP) system (see “‘Ayuda’ and much more,” 5/26/26), and mentioned that I headed a team (from Brain Trust Inc.) that the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) commissioned to assess the government’s SP programs. We examined them on six criteria: relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, sustainability, and impact. We did nationwide consultations with stakeholders; desk research on data, reports, and past evaluations; and our own nationwide survey on over 2,400 households, including both beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries (as basis for comparison) of four SP programs: DSWD’s 4Ps, Sustainable Livelihood Program (SLP), and Social Pension for Indigent Senior Citizens (SPISC), and the Department of Labor and Employment’s Tulong Panghanapbuhay sa Ating Disadvantaged/Displaced Workers (Tupad). Having completed the work that took over a year (much longer than we had anticipated), I’ve obtained clearance from DSWD Secretary Rex Gatchalian to begin sharing our team’s key findings here. I will focus on 4Ps for now, and, given space constraints, just highlight observations on how 4Ps rates on two of the criteria, namely, relevance, and impact.
To be relevant for poverty reduction, a program must first be truly biased for the poor and must be responsive to the welfare needs of the beneficiaries. “Biased for the poor” means that it covers a greater percentage of the poor population than of the nonpoor. The Family Income and Expenditures Survey of the Philippine Statistics Authority for 2023, the latest available, also tracked beneficiaries of nine government SP programs. From it, we found that 4Ps has the largest coverage of the population among the nine tracked programs, benefiting more than 17 percent of Filipino households. It was also most biased for the poor, having covered 42.8 percent of poor households as against 13.2 percent of nonpoor households, for a ratio of 3.25 to one, the largest ratio among the nine programs included in the survey.
The nonpoor coverage shows that there will always be inclusion errors—i.e., nonpoor households who managed to become beneficiaries—but the numbers show how these were outnumbered overwhelmingly by the deserving recipients of the assistance. The WB has in fact praised 4Ps as among the best targeted CCTs in the world, and this is because beneficiaries were identified and selected using survey data from the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction, also known as Listahanan. There had been three rounds of this nationwide survey that collected detailed socioeconomic data on all households in the country, making it possible to find the truly deserving based on their household attributes.
As for impact, our study’s own household survey asked beneficiaries to rate four major programs (Tupad, SLP, 4Ps, and SPISC) on how well they improve their family welfare in terms of access to food, housing, health care, and education, and on their ability to repay their loans and raise their savings. Here, 4Ps got the highest overall rating and highest single criterion rating, for access to education, and also high marks for improving health and food access. Rigorous statistical analysis on the survey data showed that only 4Ps readily had a statistically significant impact on raising household income; the other SP programs fell short. From what we’ve seen, there’s good reason that 4Ps is described as our flagship antipoverty program.
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