The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) field office in the Caraga region has started receiving grievance reports from the public regarding its initial list of the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR) or the Listahanan, the office said in a social media post on Wednesday.

DSWD-Caraga published ahead of time their initial list of families qualified to become beneficiaries of the agency’s poverty alleviation programs.

NHTS director, lawyer Justin Batocabe, said the projected date of the national office to release the initial list is in November.

“Ang DSWD pinaagi sa Listahanan Area Supervisors nagsugod na sa pagdawat sa mga reklamo subay sa nakapilit/nakapaskil nga inisyal nga listahan sa mga kabus nga pamilya sa mga munisipyo/ciudad sa Agusan del Norte (DSWD, through its Listahanan Area Supervisors, started accepting complaints on the initial list of poor Filpino families in Agusan del Norte),” the DSWD Caraga said.

The field office added that anyone with suggestions or complaints regarding the result of the list may personally visit their respective barangay halls.

They may also express their concerns with the government office online through their official website: https://listahanan.dswd.gov.ph/grievance/.

The validation and finalization phase is the third of four steps laid out by the NHTS-PR and is considered most critical as the public’s input can change the initially released list.

During this phase, all encoded information indicated in the household assessment form (HAF) is subjected to proxy means test (PMT) for the generation of the initial list of poor households which shall undergo community validation.

Meanwhile, DSWD clarified that the Listahanan 3 aims to identify who and where the poor are in the country and does not determine additional beneficiaries nor delist ineligible households under the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps).

Delisting of 4Ps beneficiaries is done through the Grievance Redress System (GRS) of the program and not through Listahanan.

GRS follows a process to validate the delisting of beneficiaries which are based on factors such as fraud, waived enrolment, no more eligible members, and income is above the poverty threshold.

DSWD has partnered with the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) to ensure the cooperation of local government units (LGUs), specifically the barangays, in the on-going assessment.

The department said it wants to highlight the role of LGUs in assisting DSWD to locate the households that are needed to be assessed to make sure that no one is left behind.

As of October 5, the Listahanan team said they have already assessed 14,407,108 households and 14,087,512 of these have already been encoded. (PNA)