The poor can be more decent than the average Juan dela Cruz.

Believe it or not, there are members of the marginalized sector who realize that handouts are not only ineffective but are even counterproductive.

This segment of the impoverished population believe that only individual resolve in using their skills or by engaging in micro-enterprise can they achieve a meaningful improvement in their quality of life.

Indeed the biblical instruction on teaching people how to fish instead of giving them fish still rings true to this day.

And the poor who struggle to survive “by the sweat of their brow” realize this only too well.

At least this urban poor group believes that indeed the government’s conditional cash transfer program breeds mendicancy and is a “band-aid solution to poverty”.

“(Doles) never really worked to alleviate people’s economic condition, they’re only either ‘pa-pogi’ points (to look good) for the government or an attempt to pacify dissent or preempt one,” Sheena Duazo, deputy secretary general of the Kalipunan ng Damayang Mahihirap, was quoted by a major broadsheet as saying.

Duazo issued the statement after the government announced that its fund for the CCT program had been increased for next year.

But the government is continuing the porgram anyway.

In fact, Esther Versoza, director of the Department of Social Welfare and Development for Southern Mindanao, said the expanded CCT program would benefit three million households by next year, up 700,000 from the current 2.3 million households.

Department of Budget and Management director for Southern Mindanao Achilles Bravo said the government wanted to minimize poverty that social services were given a total budget of P575.8 billion for next year.

“The number of beneficiaries of CCT was projected to increase to three million households from the current over two million as this remains a priority poverty alleviation program of the Aquino administration,” he said.

But Duazo said pouring more funds into the CCT program would not solve poverty.

She said all the government needs to do is look at the experience of Brazil and other Latin American countries to realize that the CCT program would never liberalize the poor sector of society.

The government’s CCT program, she said, was patterned after similar efforts in Latin America.

“The CCT is not sustainable, and does not provide fundamental changes to the economic struggles of every poor family—it was never really designed for such,” Duazo said.

In fact, she said the program could even be a “venue for corruption and mendicancy”.