THE Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has temporarily stopped accepting applications for its program on educational assistance to indigent students in Zamboanga Peninsula.
Ivan Eric Salvador, DSWD regional information officer, said Wednesday, August 31, 2022, that they are conducting an assessment to determine if the number of qualified applicants has already reached the target number of beneficiaries in the region.
“We are doing the assessment to ensure the number of qualified applicants is within our target number of beneficiaries so as not to give false hope,” Salvador said.
Salvador said that the target number of the agency in the region is to give educational assistance to at least 26,000 students until the last Saturday of September.
He said they now have a total of P70 million funding allocation for the educational assistance program since they managed to secure an additional P40-million fund from the DSWD central office.
“We are just waiting for the additional funds to be downloaded to us,” he said.
Originally, the DSWD regional office allocated P30 million for the program in Zamboanga Peninsula.
A qualified elementary student is entitled to P1,000, while a high school student will get P2,000. A senior high school student is entitled to P3,000 and a college or vocational course student gets P4,000. Only up to three children per family are entitled to financial aid.
Meanwhile, the DSWD released P6,066,000 to 2,053 beneficiaries on Saturday, August 27, the second schedule of the distribution of educational assistance.
Of the total recipients, 1,116 were from Zamboanga City and the remaining were as follows: 184, Ipil, Zamboanga Sibugay; 102, Liloy, Zamboanga del Norte; 185, Dipolog City, Zamboanga del Norte; 279, Pagadian City, Zamboanga del Sur; 187, Isabela City, Basilan. (SunStar Zamboanga)