A recipient of the social amelioration program (SAP) subsidy receives his aid. | file photo
CEBU CITY, Philippines – Around 30,000 families from two large cities in Cebu have yet to receive their financial assistance from the national government, agencies here report.
Shalaine Lucero, assistant director of the Department of Social Welfare and Development in Central Visayas (DSWD-7), said the Special Amelioration Program (SAP) is still ongoing in the cities of Cebu and Mandaue as of 5 p.m. on Wednesday, May 20, 2020.
Lucero told CDN Digital in a phone interview that they approved the request of the two the local governments to have their deadline extended up to Friday, May 22, 2020.
“They informed our office they needed to extend the deadline up to Friday (May 22) to complete the distribution. We approved their request. But we told them that there no more extension will be made beyond it since we will be submitting our liquidation report by then,” said Lucero in Cebuano.
Lucero also said Cebu City and Mandaue City are almost near in completing the cash distribution as they reported a payout rate of 88 percent and 73 percent respectively as of Wednesday.
“We’re hopeful our local governments can complete their payouts by Friday. And we hope they learned several lessons along the way especially that there’s still a second tranche of cash aid,” she added.
SAP entitles each qualified household to receive P6,000 worth of cash aid. The financial assistance program, which is the subject of several controversies, is intended for the “country’s poorest of the poor” affected by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis.
A total of P6.3 billion worth of SAP was allocated for more than 1 million families in Central Visayas, and around P3.5 billion are assigned to Cebu island that includes the cities of Cebu, Mandaue, and Lapu-Lapu.
READ: Over 850K families in Central Visayas received SAP
Among the reasons for the delay of SAP distribution in the cities of Cebu and Mandaue was population density, according to DSWD-7. /bmjo