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NewsTranscript
00:00The guidelines issued by the Department of Social Welfare and Development for the implementation of the program for teenage mothers are already in effect.
00:08And we have another issue that we will talk about live, DSWD Spokesperson and Assistant Secretary Irene Dumlao.
00:14Good morning, Asec. This is Maris. Let's go live to the first news.
00:18Good morning, Maris. Good morning to everyone who is watching your program.
00:22First of all, Asec, how serious is the problem of teenage pregnancies in the country?
00:28And should we consider that these levels are already alarming?
00:33Well, Maris, if you remember, in 2019, the Commission on Population and Development issued a report
00:41that states that in that year, we had 1.2 million minor-led households or families with young parents.
00:52And we saw that this has an impact on the growth of our country.
00:59It also has an effect on the condition of our youth, especially our teenage moms.
01:06And this prompted the national government agencies, particularly the members of the Human Development and Poverty Reduction Program
01:15to come up with social protection programs that will help address this concern.
01:22In fact, there is a law, this is the Executive Order No. 141, Series of 2021,
01:29that establishes as a national priority the implementation of measures to address the root cause of the increase in early pregnancies.
01:41And of course, mobilize government agencies to participate in the social protection program for mothers and their children.
01:52Asec, I made a report on this recently and it states that the younger the child,
02:00as a matter of fact, it is no longer called a teenage pregnancy but a child pregnancy because others are as early as 10 years old.
02:08This is the situation.
02:09Are there still a lot of people who are monitoring that this young person is also pregnant?
02:16Well, of course, the Department of Social Welfare and Development is helping,
02:22aside from other agencies of the government, to monitor the cases of teenage pregnancies.
02:30Now, on the part of the DSWD, we are focused on social protection and of course our contribution on advocacy,
02:40particularly in preventing cases of children or teenage pregnancies.
02:46Speaking of programs and advocacy, in your Protect Teens program specifically,
02:50how can this help teenage mothers or children who are already mothers?
02:56What agencies and livelihood programs are you providing to them?
03:03Well, Marice, this Protect Teen is a social welfare model of intervention that aims to protect the rights and of course,
03:12to protect the psychological well-being of adolescent mothers and of course their families.
03:19We know that early pregnancy affects the psychological well-being of an individual, especially a young person.
03:28This affects their academic performance and worse, it might result to them dropping out of school
03:36because they want to avoid embarrassment and of course, the economic challenges that the family might be facing.
03:46So this Protect Teen developed by our agency, of course, its aim is to improve the psychological well-being of adolescents.
03:57To have family healing sessions, to have family case management, to introduce livelihood or educational assistance to them.
04:10Also, to improve their capacity as early parents.
04:17So this is implemented by DSWD, civil society organizations, local government units, particularly local social welfare development offices.
04:31Of course, the program has project components including providing an enabling environment,
04:41providing a supportive home environment for early parents or teenage moms and their partners.
04:51And of course, empowering adolescent mothers because we wanted to provide them the right information
04:58so that they can avoid the repetition of pregnancy.
05:03How does this address the discrimination and the social stigma against teenage mothers?
05:12That's good that we mentioned that, Marisa.
05:16One of the project components of the program is advocacy and providing a healing environment for our teenage moms.
05:26So there will also be information sessions for our project to inform the public to help, protect, and support these teenage moms.
05:41So that the stigma can be reduced and they won't have a hard time facing their responsibilities as teenage moms.
05:53We have a different topic, Asec.
05:56This is related to the problem of starvation of our countrymen.
06:00How will we implement the four-piece and other programs?
06:05For the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program, we will continue to implement this program.
06:12We have more than four million household beneficiaries still being served under this particular program.
06:19Of course, they are still receiving cash grants provided that they continue to comply with the specific conditions of the program.
06:27Apart from that, DSWD will continue to implement the Food Stamp Program, which will scale up its implementation this year from 3,000 beneficiaries.
06:42We intend to cover 300,000 beneficiaries across the country this year.
06:47We know that the FSP is one of the priority programs of the Marcos administration that aims to fight involuntary hunger by providing food augmentation to the bottom one million households
07:02based on the list of our agency that is included in the food poor criteria that has been defined by the Philippine Statistics Authority.
07:14Also, DSWD is continuously encouraging local government units to implement the Supplementary Feeding Program that provides nutritious snacks and hot meals
07:28to augment the regular meals of children enrolled in child development centers and supervised neighborhood plays.
07:37Also, the Interagency Task Force on Zero Hunger and DSWD together with their partner agencies are continuing to prioritize the implementation and monitoring of nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive programs to address food insecurity in our country.
08:00So these are just a few of the programs that DSWD and other government agencies are implementing to contribute to the problem of hunger.
08:12All right. Thank you very much, DSWD spokesperson and Assistant Secretary Irene Dumla. Good morning to you all.
08:18Thank you very much. Good morning.
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