ILOILO City – The city gov’t has until May 10 to complete the distribution of the cash assistance under the national government’s Social Amelioration Program (SAP).
This Sunday was the third deadline (second extension) given by the Department of Interior and Local Government to local government units (LGUs) to finish the cash distribution.
The original deadline was April 30. An extension was allowed (until May 7).
Each low-income household beneficiary is allotted P6,000.
To beat the second extension deadline, Mayor Jerry Treñas proposed the holding of distribution at the expansive Iloilo City Freedom Grandstand on Muelle Loney Street.
There, social distance would be easy to impose, he said.
Treñas said the difficulty in imposing social distancing – a measure to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 – was one of the reasons for the slow SAP cash distribution.
Treñas may exempt the beneficiaries from the ongoing enhanced community quarantine curfew. He said the distribution could reach late into the night.
As of May 7, according to the City Social Welfare and Development Office, the cash assistance has so far been released to beneficiaries in 109 of the city’s 180 barangays.
Another reason Treñas cited for the slow distribution was the addition of more households in the original list of identified beneficiaries.
The SAP target beneficiaries in Iloilo City are 79,215 households.
In the whole Western Visayas, according to the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), only 49 of the 133 local government units were able to complete the SAP cash distribution as of May 7.
In DSWD’s SAP guidelines, eligible for cash assistance are low-income families with members belonging to either of these vulnerable sectors: senior citizens, persons with disability, pregnant women, lactating mothers, solo parents, overseas Filipino workers in distress, informal workers, occasional workers like househelpers or drivers (of pedicabs, tricycles, taxis, public utility buses, and public utility jeepneys), micro-entrepreneurs, sub-minimum wage earners, farmers, fishermen (provided they are not recipients of assistance from the Department of Agriculture), and workers in the private sector observing “no work, no pay” (provided they have not availed themselves of the COVID-19 Adjustment Measures Program of the Department of Labor and Employment)./PN
