The National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR) is a data bank and an information management system that identifies who and where the poor are in the

Republic of the Philippines The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no), * bik, Republika kan Filipinas * ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas * cbk, República de Filipinas * hil, Republ ...

. Data collection began in response to findings by the National Statistical Coordination Board that 30% of

Filipino Filipino may refer to: * Something from or related to the Philippines ** Filipino language, standardized variety of 'Tagalog', the national language and one of the official languages of the Philippines. ** Filipinos, people who are citizens of th ...

families have an income below that needed for "basic requirements". It is intended to inform government departments and policy-makers on the

socio-economic Socioeconomics (also known as social economics) is the social science that studies how economic activity affects and is shaped by social processes. In general it analyzes how modern societies progress, stagnate, or regress because of their local ...

status of nearly 400,000 households.

Outcomes

The use of the NHTSPR has led to 4.4 million poor households being enrolled in Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program or the Philippine conditional cash transfer program, and the poor elderly receiving

social pension A social pension (or non-contributory pension) is a stream of payments from state to an individual that starts when someone retires and continues in payment until death. It is a part of a pension system of most developed countries, specifically the ...

s. It has also led to 4,000 health cards being distributed which provide state-run

health insurance Health insurance or medical insurance (also known as medical aid in South Africa) is a type of insurance that covers the whole or a part of the risk of a person incurring medical expenses. As with other types of insurance, risk is shared among ma ...

for poor families.

Current operations

The database has identified a total of 5.25 million households below the poverty threshold of their respective provinces. With such information, national government agencies, local government unit, and non-government organizations can direct resources to the ones who need them the most. With the use of the database, projects like electrification can be concentrated on areas with high incidence of poverty, uplifting the community economic sustainability and reducing poverty. The system can also correlate other poverty related problems like human trafficking in order to prevent them from even happening.

Driving mechanism

Since the NHTS-PR is technically an information management system, it is very reliant on technology. It uses Open Technologies as the primary software backbone and the latest multiple processor servers available at the time. A major challenge inherent to data sharing is

porting In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desi ...

since different agencies are using different proprietary software. To overcome such challenge, data porting software are developed in-house from existing Open Source systems.

References

{{reflist Department of Social Welfare and Development (Philippines) Poverty in the Philippines