About 4,521 families here received assistance from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) through the social amelioration program (SAP), the city’s information office said on Tuesday.

As of April 13, the city government has disbursed a total of PHP24,558,000 in SAP subsidy in 83 barangays.

Approximately 45,000 households stand to benefit from financial assistance.

When the distribution started on Holy Thursday, more than 300 heads of families were issued their PHP5,500 equivalent to one month or for April.

The releasing went on during the Holy Week with 2,751 having received their financial assistance as of April 12 in 68 villages.

Mayor Benjamin Magalong said they are continuously finding ways to speed up the implementation of the program and to ensure the fair and objective selection of beneficiaries.

The city government had earlier assigned 200 of its personnel to help in the assessment and validation of qualified beneficiaries to fast-track the releasing of the cash aid.

He recently ordered villages to involve residents in the selection process by appointing three to five well-respected persons to the identification committee to ensure transparency and objectivity.

He also required the regular updating and posting of the list of grantees in each barangay.

City Social Welfare and Development (CSWD) officer Betty Fangasan said to ensure that no household is overlooked, the barangays would be required to profile all families through the submission of Form 200 to determine who is qualified.

“There are instances that some families who used to have financial resources before the lockdown are no longer capable today so we have to profile everyone,” she said.

Barangays will initially identify and screen the beneficiaries with the use of family profiling forms. The raw list will be submitted to the CSWD office for validation through house-to-house interviews. Qualified beneficiaries will be issued a social amelioration card.

Once validated, documents would be processed and payouts to be done in the barangays.

Magalong said more teams from the city government and volunteer groups would be deployed to help in the validation of beneficiaries.

Private schools such as St. Louis University and the National Institute of Information Technology were tapped to augment personnel and speed up the recording of beneficiary information and come up with a database of vulnerable families in the city. (PNA)