ILOILO City – The National Commission on Senior Citizens (NCSC) pushes for the registration of senior citizens through the NCSC online registration program.
NCSC chairperson and chief executive officer lawyer Franklin M. Quijano raised this during the second quarter joint meeting of the Interagency Committee for the Older Persons and Regional Committee on Disability Affairs here recently.
“NCSC is convinced that it would be good to know each senior citizen,” said Quijano.
There are 859,891 senior citizens in the Western Visayas as of April this year. Some 385,954 seniors, or almost 45 percent, are Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) social pension beneficiaries.
The NCSC needed to collect the data since the functions, activities, and programs for senior citizens currently being undertaken by the DSWD were transferred to the NCSC by virtue of an agreement between the two agencies signed in June last year.
This was further supported by a memorandum issued by the Department of Interior and Local Government requesting local government units (LGUs) to collect such data through their respective Offices of Senior Citizen Affairs (OSCA).
Aiming to develop an excellent senior citizen information system, NCSC devised enhanced senior citizen data forms, adding some vital features to include the older person’s source of income, if applicable, skill set, and health profile, among others.
However, the voluminous documents collected from LGUs take time to be inputted into the system, hence the online registration program.
Using the official National Commission of Senior Citizens website, ncsc.gov.ph, older people who are internet savvy may fill out the online forms and register for free without hassle.
The NCSC chair emphasized that this aggressive online registration campaign is part of their effort to build an updated, enhanced, and reliable database of all Filipino senior citizens, as it generates faster data collection than manual registration.
As of this writing, the number of registered senior citizens on the NCSC website is over two million out of the estimated 12.3 million Filipinos aged 60 and older.
“We expect to have online registrants of about eight to nine million by the end of the year. But this will not happen without your help,” Quijano added.(With a report from the Philippine Information Agency 6)/PN
