Gov’t spends P18M for livelihood assistance in EV

Monday, February 6, 2012

TACLOBAN CITY-The government has spent P18 million in 2011 to provide livelihood to less competent workers in Eastern Visayas, the Department of Labor and Employment said.
 
DOLE Regional Director Forter Puguon claimed that the department’s integrated livelihood program has created 1,465 jobs and benefitted 2,930 individuals.

“Many of our ultimate programs are to alleviate poverty. In the rural areas, the key problem there is unemployment. That concern is partly traced by the fact that many of them are low educated or not educated at all,” Puguon told Leyte Samar Daily Express.
 
Out of the 2,930 program beneficiaries in 2011, the DOLE regional office reported that 1,185 were in Leyte province, 592 in Southern Leyte, 250 in Biliran, 210 in Samar, 130 in Eastern Samar, and 602 in Northern Samar.
 
The official said that they stepped up the implementation of livelihood projects knowing that there are many low skilled workers in the region.
 
“We cannot expect them to compete. We conduct jobs fair in different places but the most common problem is that many of them are not qualified. We got to focus more on them because they cannot compete for professional work.  We got to provide work for them right in their locality,” he said.
 
The livelihood program provides interventions such as livelihood enhancement, which enable the existing livelihood undertakings of self-employed workers in the informal economy grow into viable and sustainable businesses that provide income at par with the minimum wage earners.
 
The second assistance is the livelihood formation, which allows the long – term unemployed poor in the informal economy to engage in livelihood undertakings to make them productive, particularly the youth, women, disabled persons and Indigenous Peoples.
 
Another initiative is the enhancement of income augmenting livelihood intends to assist the workers in the formal economy in engaging into business to augment their income. Their business activity will provide them with additional sources of income from their share in the profit and employment of their family members.
 
Puguon said that while Eastern Visayas posts a 95.4% employment rate, many workers said that they are still looking for other sources of income.
 
Underemployment is high at 25%, which means that a fourth of the region’s labor force have seasonal jobs especially in agricultural areas.  (Leyte Samar Daily Express)

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