A new program nicknamed AKAP is the most noticeable addition to the proposed P5.768-trillion 2024 national budget.

Akap, in Filipino, means “embrace.” But is this particular idea worth opening our arms for?

Some people may immediately recoil — perhaps at the bearer of the news, House Appropriations Committee chairman Zaldy Co, as to the idea of more dole-outs, of which this program initially reeks.

Households earning P23,000 or less per month stand to benefit, Co said.

“Among the new programs, we have AKAP. Under AKAP (Ayuda sa Kapos ang Kita Program), the so-called ‘near poor’ or those earning P23,000 or less a month will be given financial assistance. This is the new program under Speaker Martin Romualdez. We are targeting around 12 million households, which include construction workers, drivers, factory workers, and the like,” Co said in Filipino.

The bicameral conference committee that met in a Makati hotel on Monday gave their thumbs-up to the over P449 billion in “changes to new appropriations — including a new one-time P5,000 cash assistance for the near-poor,” as a news report had it.

Speaker Romualdez, meanwhile, told reporters that P26.7 billion of the P5.7-trillion proposed national budget is meant “for the expansion of government subsidies to near-poor households.”

One is likely to ask if the proposed 2024 national budget — having been noted as 9.5 percent higher than 2023’s P5.267 trillion — bulked up by such cash assistance programs is really a sustainable solution to the country’s problems.

According to the Department of Budget and Management, “priority sectors for next year are still the same.”

To wit, education and health will get “the highest budget allocation with a 39-percent increase.” This is followed by agriculture with “30 percent, which will be used to fund the post-harvest and incentives for farmers and fisherfolk.”

Also, “5 percent to 6 percent of the GDP will go to infrastructure spending to boost logistics support, while digitalization will also have an increased share in the budget.”

The bulk of the proposed budget will go to social services at P2.183 trillion, or 37.9 percent of the total.

The smallest outlay will go to defense, surprisingly, at P282.7 billion, or 4.9 percent of the budget. (Although, of course, 200-plus billion is no small potatoes.)

AKAP is reminiscent of a program undertaken in Brazil called Bolsa Familia. While it was controversial in the beginning, it has been found to have “measurable gains for poverty reduction.”

Many factors contribute to the success or failure of a cash transfer program, and our government may be able to identify these based on past programs of a similar nature.

To quote a 2021 article on the Brazilian welfare program, just like budget planning, “when it comes to poverty-alleviation policies, the devil hides in the implementation details.”