MALATE, MANILA– The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) MiMaRoPa through the Listahanan will use tablets to conduct household assessment in urban areas of Mindoro, Marinduque, Palawan and Romblon provinces.

A total of 360 units of mobile device are allocated for selected barangays.

The classification of urban and rural areas in the region is based from the from the Philippine Statistics Authority data.

The Department will install and use the mobile version of Family Assessment Form (FAF).  FAF contains indicators such as household composition, housing structure, and education of household members, material assets and access to basic services which is critical in identifying the socio-economic status of a family whether they are poor or not.

Moreover, DSWD targets 158,112 households in the urban barangays regionwide or 27 percent of the total target.

“Utilizing android tablets will maximize the information technology and facilitate the digitization of the family assessment. Also it lessens the cost for hiring more encoders thus it saves time for the encoding process,” said Regional Field Coordinator Ernie H. Jarabejo.

Hired enumerators will be deployed starting this month to do household interviews using these tablets.

The ongoing Listahanan assessment in rural areas where the paper version of FAFs is used, has completed 414,189 households or 70 percent from its target.

Listahanan is a mechanism of targeting poor households in the country. Identified poor are potential beneficiaries of various governments’ poverty alleviation programs. ###