The shift from a conditional cash transfer to an unconditional cash program has been proposed for bed-ridden seniors and severely challenged persons with disabilities since the good Senator Imee Marcos, sister of the President, realized that they constitute the “unserved poor Filipinos.”

Certainly, this augurs well for this marginalized segment of society but more so if the so-called Assistance to Individuals in Crisis Situations (AICS) would likewise be institutionalized.

Apparently, the chairperson of the Senate Committee on Social Justice, Welfare and Rural Development believes the country is already “affluent,” not to say the economy is probably at that stage in Rostow’s “preconditions for take-off,” thereby reinforcing the lady senator’s advocacy of “no one left behind.”

So as a step in the right direction, the President’s senator-sister has envisioned the expansion and diversification of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) to reach more poor beneficiaries who can no longer work.

In lieu of the newly proposed 4Ps menu, some “exit strategies” have been solicited to allow “more impoverished Filipinos to avail of the program, including the Alternative Learning System, adult education, and entrepreneurship and other employment activities.”

Understandably, the earlier 4Ps only focused on vaccination and the completion of a high school education for minors below 18 years, which are a disincentive for self-sufficiency.

All the current efforts appear designed to correct or improve on the failure of the 4Ps based on the old contemplation which, as a Commission on Audit report indicated, failed to alleviate the plight of the poor. What actually happened was “a total of 4.2-million active 4Ps beneficiaries have been in the program for seven to 13 years” but have not reached a level of self-sufficiency. Worse, “90 percent of active 4Ps beneficiaries in 2022 were still well below the poverty line and would remain there.”

These realities are a cause for worry since public funds in the several millions of pesos are being disbursed that have zero to little impact on the poor sector of Philippine society. Come to think of it, the annual budget for the 4Ps is US$1.7 billion, it being beefed up with additional funding from the World Bank to cover, for example, nine percent of the 4Ps budget through June 2022.

Apparently, it has been supporting 4Ps over the last decade albeit the program is focused more on improved health, educational outcomes of poor and vulnerable families, and to help millions of families overcome poverty.

Ironically, if the way forward is to diversify the 4Ps menu to expand its reach to the unserved poor, to graduate those beneficiaries that benefitted from the program for as long as 13 years, to democratize opportunities for a state subsidy and significantly reduce poverty incidence, does it logically entail increased borrowings from the World Bank to fund the program in its new broader contemplation?

If a new loan agreement would be forged to make this social protection system viable, the staggering amount of over US$300 million to finance the 4Ps would be inevitable. As promised by the then finance secretary during President Rodrigo Duterte’s term, the World Bank’s sustained funding support for the government’s conditional cash transfer program for the “country’s poorest households will go a long way in helping the Duterte administration achieve its agenda of reducing the poverty incidence to 14 percent by 2022 and delivering a comfortable life to every Filipino,” give or take a few.

Then Secretary Carlos Dominguez III asserted that the 4Ps was an investment in the next generation of Filipinos who needed to be prepared “to reap the benefits of the Philippines’ fast-approaching demographic dividend.”

In its present form, the best that the Senate should have preoccupied itself with was to find ways and means to do away with the never-ending loan agreement with the World Bank.

Time to cut the umbilical cord?