Inabanga is getting ready for the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) that will soon be implemented in the municipality. Asela Bella Tse, Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) Region 7's focal person on 4Ps conducted the supply side orientation: the program's objectives, benefits, conditionalities, the selection process and the participants' roles in its implementation. “The 4Ps is a poverty reduction strategy that provides grants to extremely poor households to improve their health, nutrition and education particularly of children aged 0-14,'' Tse said. She said the beneficiary must have children attending school, otherwise they would not be eligible for the program. However, not everyone below the poverty line can be accommodated. That is why beneficiaries are prioritized to include only the “poorest of the poor.”

The program entails conditionalities that focus on health and education, hence the need to assess the supplies available such as school buildings, ratio of books to each student, health center buildings and medicines in the area, she said. She added that identified children-beneficiaries must comply with 85% attendance and parents must receive regular preventive health check ups and other health conditions. At the same time, she thanked the Department of Education and Department of Health as their partner agencies. “It would be impossible to demand the beneficiaries' compliance to the conditionalities without them,” she said. Inabanga is one of only 13 town-bene