The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) is hopeful that the Social Pension for Indigent Senior Citizens (SocPen) will be given additional funding by Congress for the program’s implementation in 2025.
“We would like to inform the committee that there are 612,277 waitlisted senior citizens as of July 31, 2024, who are not yet included in the budget of the program at present and for the next year,” DSWD Secretary Rex Gatchalian reported during the September 16 deliberation of the agency’s proposed 2025 budget by the Senate Committee on Finance chaired by Senator Imee Marcos.
Secretary Gatchalian explained that based on the outline of the DSWD’s Tier 2 proposal, regional funding is crucial to ensure that all senior citizens will receive the necessary support.
For 2025, the budget proposal of the Department for the SocPen program is at Php49.807 billion, which is enough to provide the Php1,000 monthly stipend of the 4 million indigent senior citizens around the country.
The DSWD chief pointed out the agency has Php5.95 billion allocated under unprogrammed appropriation, but the budget can only cover 490,000 waitlisted indigent senior citizens, and is still subject to availability of government funds.
Secretary Gatchalian assured the Senate finance committee that the DSWD will continue to work closely with the National Commission of Senior Citizens (NCSC) to ensure that the social protection programs for the elderly sector will be efficiently implemented.
