Unabated poverty with CCTs continuing past a study on the socio-politico-economic impact of the Conditional Cash Transfer Program in Urban Manila

Abstract

In the midst of continuing and worsening global crises, the prevalence of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) remains among the key poverty alleviation measures resorted to by governments and highly promoted by international financial institutions (IFIs). For more than a decade, CCTs expanded to all continents from 3 pilot countries in 1997 to more than a nine-fold of 28 countries at present. This is supported by IFIs, led by the World Bank, with a great surge of funding through loans attached with conditionalities. Many countries especially in Latin America and Asia subscribed faithfully to these conditions set in the loan packages, among them is the Philippines. Since 2007, the Philippine government has implemented CCTs as part of its Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program along with other ongoing social programs. But without any extensive and comprehensive evaluation, national budget allocation for CCTs has tremendously increased and its areas of implementation expanded in multitude. This, among many questionable components of 4Ps, has raised strong criticisms on the implementation of CCTs in the Philippines The findings of this study are in consonance with the positions of IBON that CCT program is bound to fail due to the following factors: (i) exclusive rather than inclusive development, (ii) mere dole-out, (iii) increased debt burden, (iv) patronage, corruption, inefficiency and others as these factors surfaced in the responses obtained through the survey. The study therefore concludes that CCTs through the 4Ps pose more detrimental impacts rather than alleviating poverty.