DOLE: DAP made workers’ lives better

MANILA, Philippines – Thousands of unemployed youth and other vulnerable workers now lead much better lives because of the Disbursement Allocation Program (DAP), according to the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE).

Labor Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz said DOLE was able to implement five programs for the youth and the unemployed using P143.330 million released through DAP between December 2012 and June 2013.

The programs, she said, included the Special Program for the Employment of Students (SPES), P27.217 million; Government Internship Program (GIP), P11.393 million; emergency employment under the Tulong Panghanapbuhay Para sa Ating Displaced Workers (TUPAD), P47 million; production of Labor Market Information (LMI) infrastructure or job search kiosks, P13.720 million; and acquisition of IT communication devices for the new Labor Law Compliance Program, P44 million.

Baldoz said the five programs benefited about 30,552 unemployed youth and vulnerable workers displaced by calamities and disasters.

She stressed that DOLE spent the money as intended, under the specific line-item appropriation of the General Appropriations Act of 2012.

“We did not use any conduit, private organizations or Napoles-style foundations. In areas where individual beneficiaries express desire to be in a group, we organized them into community-based enterprises,” she explained.

Of the P143.3 million received by the DOLE under DAP, P134.126 million or 99 percent had been utilized, P1.463 million returned to the National Treasury and P7.741 million still being used for ongoing projects.

Baldoz said DOLE has already submitted accomplishment reports on the use of the funds released through DAP.

“The accomplishment reports contain the names and addresses of the beneficiaries, and in compliance with the requirements of Section 93 of the General Appropriations Act of 2013 (RA 10352), these are posted under Item 5 in the Transparency Seal in the DOLE website. For the regions, the names of the beneficiaries are posted in their respective websites,” she added.

“The GIP places youth beneficiaries, specifically college graduates/undergraduates, tech-voc graduates and high school graduates in government offices to work for six months for them to gain experience on work in the bureaucracy. They are paid 75 percent of the minimum wage applicable in the area where they work,” Baldoz said.

Under DAP, the DOLE received P47 million which was used to pay for the wages of 6,542 workers hired under the emergency employment program in the National Capital Region and of 17,210 others in Negros Oriental displaced or affected by the flash floods in October 2012.

A total of 204 gadgets had been purchased using DAP funds and distributed among Labor Laws Compliance Officers in every region.

Baldoz also said the DOLE purchased software licenses using P44 million in additional funds for the job search kiosks, prototypes of which had been delivered this month.

DAR’s plaint

The Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), for its part, said the DAP concept has made possible the implementation of several projects for farming communities.

Agrarian Reform Secretary Virgilio de los Reyes said the Agrarian Reform Communities Project 2 (ARCP 2) funded under DAP benefited 738,505 farmers and community members, 440,387 of whom were agrarian reform beneficiaries.

The ARCP2 is a $208-million foreign-assisted project of the DAR of which $100 million is financed by a concessional loan from the Asian Development Bank and the OPEC Fund for International Development.

The ARCP2 project includes the construction and rehabilitation of rural infrastructure such as farm to market roads, flood protection works, bridges, potable water systems, post-harvest facilities and social infrastructure.

ARCP2 project sites are located in 19 of the country’s poorest provinces, including five in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. –-Mayen Jaymalin (The Philippine Star) with John Unson, Rhodina Villanueva