‘Government moving to insulate AKAP from politicians’

MANILA, Philippines — Three government agencies are now in the process of fine-tuning an efficient system where beneficiaries of the government’s Ayuda Para sa Kapos ang Kita (AKAP) Program will be totally free from the influence of either national or local politics.

Officials of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), the lead agency for the distribution of the financial aid to the near poor; Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) and the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) sat down last week and devised ways on how to go about it.

They called this fine-tuning a “refined intake form to assess the eligibility” of AKAP beneficiaries.

DSWD Secretary Rex Gatchalian affirmed that AKAP-referred clients and their documents are still subject to the social workers’ assessment and their stringent vetting process, while the NEDA will monitor and evaluate and the DOLE will provide information and list on potential beneficiaries.

“Anybody can refer, but at the end of the day, it will still be the results of the interviews and assessments of the social workers that will be followed,” Gatchalian, who vowed to make AKAP “insulated from politics,” stressed.

“For us, the role of every NEDA program, we will provide monitoring and evaluation,” NEDA chief Arsenio Balisacan said, citing that agency’s primary role are “monitoring and evaluation mechanism.”

The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), NEDA’s attached agency, also stands ready to provide all the needed information.

The PSA data can be used to check how many are working in the family and who among them are the minimum wage earners, according to Balisacan.

Meanwhile, Labor Secretary Bienvenido Laguesma said the DOLE would provide information on potential beneficiaries, including the standard wage rate across the country to give way to a more standardized and seamless sharing of reference data.

“We will help with the information through the region, their regional wages and productivity,” Laguesma added.

At the end of the meeting, Gatchalian vowed to furnish the new guidelines and intake form as soon as possible.

“Moving forward, we’ll try to clean everything up and incorporate by next