Poverty Reduction

One of the reasons, many of us in the NGO sector say that we feel responsible for the problem of poverty in the country is that we have been engaging our government in writing into a law the policy for poverty reduction. And the reason why the NGO movement regard the Social Reform and Poverty Alleviation Act ( R.A. 8425) which created the National Anti- Poverty Commission (NAPC) as one of its gains is because, as NGOs, we participated in writing the narrative of this social reform agenda during the Ramos Administration. 


 So, where is NAPC now in this challenge towards poverty reduction? At the least, NAPC continues to engage fourteen (14) basic sectors in particular  and  the big civil society collective in general. This engagement is towards uniting the fourteen basic sectors in development sites and geographic areas. NAPC now “correlates poverty programs with programs for promoting economic growth (and) dividing the country into three economic zones: 1) rural and  peri-urban areas….(2) areas further away from urban growth centers but with good resource endowments and ; (3) areas with neither good resource nor logistical connections to urban areas.” 

 The one thing that must be understood up front is that this engagement is towards influencing policy as the NAPC is not a line agency implementing particular programs. The engagement of basic sectors is through partnership with government agencies because after all it is not the duty of NGOs to implement government programs. So, for example, the NAPC women sectoral council of the basic sector works in partnership with the Philippine Commission on Women, the urban poor sector works with the Phil Commission on the Urban Poor (PCUP). 

 What is the poverty picture of the Philippines? According to NAPC and the 2011 census: “more than one fourth are poor and ; we have been the only country in Asia where the absolute number of poor have increased ( over the years) from 1990 to 2005.” So, one of the major goals under the P-Noy administration is to reduce poverty by half. This P-Noy administration recognizes that increase in gross national product (Gross domestic product is now 5.9 %) will not result to poverty reduction and so written in the goal is the important role of budgets or the allocation of “bigger budgets for social services and  identifying 609 towns from the poorest regions and provinces.” 

 Two key components of the NAPC anti poverty strategy which have always been challenges since time immemorial are the strategy for asset reform and  employment. Asset reform is about agrarian reform and  the issue of ancestral domain. In turn, critics of the conditional cash transfer program ( 4Ps) say that providing employment is more crucial to poverty reduction. Of course, 4Ps or the Pantawid Pamilya Pilipino Program which has been successful in other parts of the world such as in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia and Africa is designed to address inter generational poverty by making sure that children have nutrition and  are able go to school and the  mothers’ health are taken care of. So, even if the 4Ps may not provide jobs now, at least, there is food on the table and  the children are able to finish basic education  and hopefully find jobs later thus breaking the cycle of poverty. This is what social protection is all about. This way also, we are able to achieve the millennium development goals as agreed by a community of nations. 


 Some members of the basic sectors want to participate in the identification of beneficiaries of this Pantawid Pamilya Pilipino Program. My sense is that such participation should only be in the area of policy or  in setting the criteria for the process of selection of  beneficiaries.  Civil society or the basic sectors are advocacy partners but are not implementing partners of government programs. 

 In Mindanao, where majority of the country’s poor provinces are found, the poverty reduction program is also a “complementary track to the Peace Process by addressing the roots of the armed conflict.” This is a correct track because aside from politics and feudal wars, the main reason for the struggle with peace in most areas is poverty and  hunger. In 2005, the Human Development Network in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), etc said “that deprivation and injustice rather than hardship alone, lie at the heart of armed conflict which can be empirically validated and demonstrated (and that) “measures of deprivation do predict the occurrence of armed encounters. Relative deprivation becomes more acute with minoritization.”