Ayuda or aid has been in the news a lot, whether in the Philippines or in the US (in the context of US President Donald Trump’s attacks on the US Agency for International Development or USAID).
But first, let’s discuss some ayuda issues here at home.
The May 12 elections are fast approaching, and concerns linger about the giving out of ayuda benefits as an indirect form of vote-buying.
One of the bigger ayuda programs out there is AKAP, or Ayuda sa Kapos ang Kita Program. A brainchild of House Speaker Martin Romualdez, AKAP has been allocated P26 billion in the 2025 national budget.
In the veto message of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., he called on three executive agencies to come up with firm guidelines on who’s eligible to receive AKAP benefits.
But the problem, as I foresaw, is that these agencies don’t have enough time to come up with such guidelines, especially as cash is handed out in the weeks before the May polls.
In a recent Senate hearing chaired by Senator Imee Marcos, who has attacked her cousin’s AKAP program, an official of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) admitted that “there is no list” of minimum wage earners that can serve as a basis for who gets AKAP or not. Disturbingly, they gave out AKAP to nearly five million people in 2024 even without such a vetted list.
Senator Marcos concluded, “It’s very, very clear, therefore, that neither NEDA [National Economic and Development Authority] nor the DOLE can come up with a list of worthy beneficiaries for AKAP.”
In the same hearing, some officials also admitted that politicians can, in fact, nominate lists of beneficiaries. Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong alleged that DSWD staff are told to “keep silent” and automatically accept lists of beneficiaries coming from district representatives.
It’s one thing for the supply of ayuda to be abundant and lax, but another if there’s strong demand for it.
On February 11, the Social Weather Stations (SWS) released the results of a survey on Filipinos’ awareness of various social welfare programs, as well as their opinion on how helpful they think these programs are.
People are most aware of the conditional cash transfer program called Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), with 93% awareness rate. Of those people, a full two-thirds said 4Ps is “very helpful”, and a quarter said it’s “helpful.”
The second most popular ayuda program is Tulong Panghanapbuhay sa Ating Disadvantaged/Displaced Workers (TUPAD) with 84% awareness rate. Half of them said it’s “very helpful,” and 37% said it’s helpful.
Despite being relatively new, AKAP is third on the list: 70% were aware of it, and of those people, 42% said it’s “very helpful,” while 39% said it’s “helpful.”
I think this is the first time we have a numerical idea of the extent of popularity of ayuda programs. And the huge numbers are unsurprising: the masses are keenly aware of ayuda programs. They rely on them a lot to augment their incomes, and many are bound to find them useful to some extent.
(By the way, is it surprising at all that some party-list groups, like 4Ps and TUPAD, are named after ayuda programs?)
I fear, though, that the huge popularity of ayuda will likely embolden politicians to keep allocating colossal public funds for it in the coming years, and ramp up ayuda spending in the run-up to elections.
With robust supply and demand, ayuda culture might be here to stay.
Trump, Musk, and USAID
At the same time that the Philippines is leaning in on ayuda culture, the US under Trump is veering away from it.
The biggest casualty so far is the US Agency for International Development or USAID. Established in 1961, USAID is said to be the single biggest aid donor in the world, and has been instrumental in promoting US soft power.
You may not realize it, but many important programs in the Philippines have benefitted from USAID. From 1961, USAID is said to have given $5 billion worth of aid to the Philippines. See Rappler’s list of recent USAID projects in the Philippines here.
At my home institution, the University of the Philippines School of Economics, USAID ran multiyear projects that supported basic and policy research in health and energy economics. These studies not only produced many academic publications and supported scholarships, but also contributed to the crafting of policies and even laws.
The decision of Trump and his co-conspirator Elon Musk to dismantle USAID poses a huge risk to many development projects all over the world, including in the Philippines.
Take for instance the Advancing Basic Education in the Philippines (ABC+) project, which has been working with the Department of Education (DepEd) to reverse the Philippines’ learning crisis and abate the learning losses wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Among other things, they developed rapid assessment tools to gauge the reading levels of kids, and reading materials targeted for K to 3 students.
Now, funding for ABC+ has been cut off, but DepEd is hoping to get the materials from this project to continue the work. In total, about P4 billion worth of education projects in the Philippines will be stopped because of USAID’s closure.
Meanwhile, Health Secretary Teodoro Herbosa said that nearly P10 billion worth of health projects, also supported by USAID, are at risk. These include programs concerning HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.
Trump and Musk are emboldened by the fact that very few Americans are even aware of USAID and its global work, and therefore pushback has been minimal. But for developing economies like the Philippines, we’re definitely going to feel the pinch.
The Marcos administration has downplayed Trump and Musk’s decision to destroy USAID. Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan said recently that USAID funding is but a “small part” of the economy, and that “much of our loans now are with other countries and multilateral institutions.”
That’s true. But with the Marcos administration itself sabotaging its development goals but defunding key programs in education, health, disaster response, and other areas, the loss of USAID funding is a greater setback than it should be. The Marcos government’s ambitious development goals (including single-digit poverty by 2028) will be all the harder to reach.Unsettlingly, the US is fast regressing and dragging the rest of the world with it. – Rappler.com
JC Punongbayan, PhD is an assistant professor at the UP School of Economics and the author of False Nostalgia: The Marcos “Golden Age” Myths and How to Debunk Them. In 2024, he received The Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) Award for economics. Follow him on Instagram (@jcpunongbayan) and Usapang Econ Podcast.