DAVAO CITY (MindaNews/18 April) — The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) will be allocating tablets and other mobile devices for its numerators during the second round of assessment for the national demographic household survey for poverty reduction (NHTS-PR) or Listahanan program this May.
Theresita Garcia, DSWD national coordinator for Region XI, said the use of the mobile devices allows for a more accurate assessment of poverty indicators in the urban area.
Supervisors, meanwhile, will be issued laptops.
The devices will be internet-ready and would provide a real time assessment of urban areas.
The Listahanan program is a poverty incidence survey conducted nationwide, with the agency targeting to reach around 200,000 households in the region.
The first round was conducted in 2009.
Garcia said the 2009 software used in the first round, from a supplier abroad, was relatively outdated.
The software being used this year was designed by a Filipino and is more apt for Filipinos, Garcia said.
Each member of the assessment team, from the numerator and field coordinator to the regional directors, would have a unique access code for the information to reduce the likelihood of hacking.
During the assessment generating team along with their coordinators and supervisors will validate and tally poverty indicators through a four-page questionnaire that each household would fill out.
The results would be sent to the National Office which would consolidate the data and enter these into a software called the proxy means test.
For the region there will be 66 area coordinators, 246 area supervisors and 427 enumerators who have signed up to assess the poverty indicators of the households in the majority of the city’s 182 barangays. (MindaNews)