Over 58, 000 indigent senior citizen beneficiaries in the provinces of Agusan Del Sur, Agusan Del Norte and Surigao Del Sur received social pension for the second semester of 2021 from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) through its Social Pension for Indigent Senior Citizens Program (SPISC).
Here is the breakdown of the numbers of beneficiaries that have been served;
Agusan Del Norte – 15, 775
Agusan Del Sur – 26, 980
Surigao Del Sur – 15, 961
During the pay out, DSWD Field Office Caraga assured adherence to the safety and health protocols to lessen the exposure of the beneficiaries and staff to the virus.
Furthermore, amidst the shift to the new normal, staff of the program continuously do their best to validate the non-validated active beneficiaries including new applicants. As of September 7, 2021, the Department has assessed 32, 604 out of 36, 015 non-validated seniors in Caraga Region. However, under the Omnibus Guidelines in the implementation of the Social Pension for Indigent Senior Citizens, validation should be done in order to determine if the senior is qualified for social pension based on its eligibility criteria. This means, inclusion to validation does not guarantee automatic inclusion not unless found eligible for the program.
The remaining numbers of seniors yet to be validated are:
Province of Dinagat Islands (PDI) – 251
Surigao Del Norte – 258
Surigao Del Sur – 819
Agusan Del Norte – 1, 328
Agusan Del Sur – 755
The Regional Social Pension Focal Persons Ana T. Semacio and Rachel B. Bade, are in close coordination and monitoring of the validation to ensure fast-paced progress.
“As much as we want to hasten the validation in order to generate payrolls considering the fact that social pension is very much needed to the seniors who are considered one of the vulnerable sectors, this pandemic has prevented us. But, thank you to the staff augmented from other programs and the staff of SocPen, that it reached the highest number validated so far in just a span of 4 months,” the program focal persons said.
SPISC is a program for indigent senior citizens in the Philippines that gives them monthly stipend of five hundred pesos to augment them in meeting their daily subsistence.
