BUTUAN CITY, Philippines – Big number of ‘Pantawid Pamilya’ beneficiaries in Northeastern Mindanao (Caraga region) are currently benefited the Php 26, 462, 317.45 infrastructure projects spread at various far-flung communities in the region, it was disclosed Monday.

With a total of 2,779 direct Pantawid Pamilya beneficiaries, Poder 6 completed a total of 25 sub-projects now ready for use in four depressed towns in Caraga region.

This includes the municipalities of Hinatuan, in Surigao del Sur; Sta. Josefa, in Agusan del Sur; Sta. Monica, in Surigao del Norte; and Tubajon, in Dinagat Islands.

For more than 1,000 volunteers in these four towns, the community-driven development or CDD technology ushered a new dawn in developmental intervention which is traditionally implemented by the LGU. However with Poder, the grassroots in the barangay level are the ones carrying out the implementation in a period of one year while receiving capability-building trainings in procurement, finance, and engineering.

In a separate interviews of various local officials, they said addressing the common service needs of people in far-flung communities in Caraga region is one herculean task and add to it a daunting mission of ending poverty by 2015, the government must have been asking for divine intervention.

Nowadays, they said Filipinos can worry less for now thanks to the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s (DSWD) anti-poverty program called Poder.

“This is really a big help to our far-flung communities,” said Surigao del Norte Gov. Sol F. Matugas, also chair of the Regional Development Council.

The nearest thing the community can witness of a deus ex machina phenomenon is Poder’s developmental intervention from the Spanish government through the Agencia Española Cooperacion Internacional para el Desarollo (AECID) which funded the said various infrastructure projects in the region.

With the government adopting the tested conditional cash transfer (CCT) program of Latin America in 2007 and the need to increase its beneficiaries to cover the poorest segment of society, there has been a surging demand to complement the Pantawid Pamilya program of a supply side – erecting school buildings, health stations, day care centers, and health stations.

Employing the community-driven development (CDD) program of another poverty alleviation program of the government called Kalahi-CIDSS or Kapit-Bisig Laban sa Kahirapan – Comprehensive and Integrated Delivery of Social Services, AECID officials saw it appropriate that the same process should be used if the communities were to address the issues confronting the Pantawid Pamilya beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries alike.

Poder comes in the scene to an act of changing its course – adopting the KALAHI-CIDSS’ framework of an “open menu” of infrastructure sub-projects since 2005, Poder favored catering the supply side of the Pantawid Pamilya program in its fifth and sixth year of implementation by improving the basic health and education services in the community.