Uncounted and underserved

THEY do not figure in the government’s poverty statistics, yet their numbers run up to millions. They barely make a blip in government radar screens as they are not part of government census.

According to the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), the “invisible poor” are made up of the ambulant and transient poor who live under bridges, road islands, and along the streets, and indigenous peoples who are not part of the sectors considered to be living with poverty.

The National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) admits the ambulant poor are excluded from official poverty estimation “due to some operational difficulties” and that residents of slums and squatter areas are likely to be underrepresented in the poverty survey.

In its website, the NSCB explained that it encounters difficulties in including these families in their sampling because of the costs, both monetary and physical, such an operation would entail. “However, the likelihood of having these families in the sample is not nil as they are covered by census; the latter being the primary reference when constructing FIES sampling frame,” said the NSCB website.

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But GCAP says the exclusion of these groups makes the government’s poverty statistics a sham, and consigns some sectors into nonexistence. The government estimates there are about 25 million Filipinos living in poverty. “But if there are 45 million Filipinos who say they are poor, then there are almost 20 million Filipinos who are not accounted for,” said GCAP-Philippines coordinator Lui Rogado. The November 2007 self-perception survey of the Social Weather Station (SWS) shows that 1 out of 2 Filipinos see themselves as poor (52 percent of the population), despite the lowering of the self-rated poverty threshold.

“Poverty may be far worse than what the government wants us to believe since there are Filipinos who are not included in the surveys, such as the ambulant and transient poor, as well as the indigenous peoples,” said Sabino G. Padilla, Jr. president of AnthroWatch, an organization working with indigenous communities and a member of the GCAP-Philippines Coordinating Committee.

“The question is, do we actually know where the poor are?” said Padilla. Padilla led the launching of AnthroWatch‘s latest poverty maps, which shows the threshold, incidence and magnitude of poverty in the country. The poverty maps also show the 181 Certificate of Ancestral Domain Claims (CADCs) and 57 Certificate of Ancestral Domain Titles (CADTs) areas. Padilla said the indigenous peoples are not part of the sectors considered to be living in poverty, although the maps show that the areas inhabited by indigenous peoples have high poverty incidence.

The poverty maps were created by using geographic information system, existing government data and a computer software which, Padilla says, the government itself has. “We did not put in resources to come up with the map,” he says.

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Rogado said the inaccuracies in the government’s poverty surveys put into question the government’s claim that it is on track in meeting its targets under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Prof. Leonor Briones, co-convenor of Social Watch Philippines, called for more government allocation for social services, to provide safety nets for poor Filipinos. Social Watch and 48 civil society groups are currently working with opposition lawmakers in the Senate for an additional budget of P25 billion for education, health, agriculture and the environment.

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“The government should first produce a more inclusive, comprehensive and accurate picture of poverty in order for the billions of pesos it allocates for its anti-poverty and hunger mitigations programs be made effective,” said GCAP-Philippines. “It should be SOP (standard operating procedure) for the government to know where its poor constituencies are in order to create programs that respond to their specific needs,” he said.

In a September 2007 report, NSCB reported that children, women and urban poor consistently accounted for the largest number of poor population at 14.1, 12.2 and 6.9 million in 2000 and 13.5, 11.6, 6.3 million in 2003, respectively. “On the other hand, fishermen, farmers and children comprised the poorest sectors with poverty incidences of 50.8 percent, 46.6 percent and 42.5 percent in 2000 and 43.6 percent, 42.4 percent and 38.8 percent in 2003, respectively,” it said.