Cagayan de Oro City — More than 48,800 senior citizens in Northern Mindanao will be benefiting from the Social Pension given by the Department of Social Welfare and Development for this year.

This after 29,499 senior citizens were validated as an addition to those qualified to the program which provides a subsidy of P1,500 every quarter to augment their needs such as medicine and food.

Qualified senior citizens are those considered to be indigent, and are aged 66 years old above and are not beneficiaries of any pension such as SSS, GSIS, among others.

Written by Charmaine P. Tadlas, DSWD

Cagayan de Oro City — The nutritional status of 2,324 children enrolled in day care centers across Northern Mindanao were reported to have normalized after undergoing the children into a 120-day feeding program implemented by the government.

More than 132,000 children who were enrolled in day care centers were given supplementary food given by the Department of Social Welfare and Development through its Supplementary Feeding Program (SFP). 15,077 of them were reported to be malnourished prior to the feeding program.

According to Atty. Araceli F. Solamillo, Regional Director of the DSWD, malnutrition among these children has decreased by 1.77% after six months from the time SFP started its implementation in the day care centers.

“From 11.37% rate of malnutrition, there was a remarkable decrease to 9.60% of malnutrition among these children,” says Solamillo.

The Department of Science and Technology revealed that in their 2008 National Nutrition Survey, results showed that malnutrition proved to be prevalent among Filipino children. The National Statistics Office also showed in their 2006 Family Income and Expenditure Survey that about 1.1% of Filipino families were considered as hungry and food-poor.

“DSWD implemented the SFP as a response to the urgent call to help the food-poor families, especially their children,” Solamillo says.

The SFP is the provision of hot meals to be served during snack or meal time to day care children five days a week for 120 days. The parents also help in the program by managing and preparing the food using indigenous food supplies guided by the DSWD and the local government units.