Digitized Scoreboard: Its Use in the Implementation of Conditional Cash Transfer Program in One Province in the Philippines

Abstract

Conditional Cash Transfer Program is an effective way of the government to eradicate poverty. Philippines is one of the many developing countries implementing it since 2007 and named it as Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program or 4Ps.  The Department of Social Welfare and Development is the implementing and facilitating unit of the government which monitors the program. Recording, updating and managing the household beneficiaries and their activities were conducted by staff implementers on each municipality then data will be collected for consolidation in the provincial level. Everything was encoded manually in a spreadsheet application and carried out every month for reporting. With the increasing number of beneficiaries, challenges such as difficulty in monitoring beneficiaries’ performance and consolidation of reports were repeatedly observed by the unit. This study focuses on the development of a digitized scoreboard for recording, updating and monitoring household beneficiaries. Consolidation of reports from municipal level up to provincial level is featured significantly. For the methodology, the researcher used the agile model to systematically design and develop the system. Then, training was conducted to assess the knowledge of target end-users with regards to managing and accessing the system. In addition, usability testing was administered to determine the usefulness, ease of use and learnability of the developed digitized scoreboard. Both the training and testing procedure were participated by 107 staff implementers in the province of Laguna and officers from regional office. The training evaluation result yield an overall mean of 3.84 which is interpreted as “Best”. This means that the target end-users of the digitized scoreboard were pleased and appreciative on the content, methodologies, management team and presentation aid used during the training. Clearly, staff implementers were able to learn how to access, manage and manipulate the developed digitized scoreboard. Furthermore, testing results revealed that with the design and structure of the developed digitized scoreboard, staff implementers were able to record and update the information and conditionalities, monitor status, consolidate reports of household beneficiaries of Pantawid Program with ease of use, effectively, satisfactorily and with minimal supervision from technical experts. Thus, the developed digitized scoreboard is a useful system for the implementing unit of the government and an innovative way to do the tasks of each staff implementers in managing and monitoring the conditional cash transfer program household beneficiaries.