P-Noy’s Poverty Challenge

In the next fortnight, President Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III will fly to the United States – his first trip out of the country as chief executive – in part to attend the United Nations General Assembly on the Millennium Development Goals or MDGs.

But he may have little reason to celebrate in New York where he is expected to present just how far the Philippines has achieved progress in attaining the MDGs.

Unfortunately, in large measure because of the shortcomings of his predecessor, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Aquino is bound to acknowledge before other world leaders that the country is falling short of several targets, notably those designed to lift the plight of Filipino children and mothers.

In September 2000, the Philippines and 188 other countries signed the Millennium Declaration, and committed themselves to achieving a set of eight goals by 2015. These goals – the MDGs – have since been commonly accepted as a framework for measuring development progress for both rich and poor countries.

Yet in the last decade, the Philippines has made little progress in the three areas that are most crucial to human development: poverty alleviation, health (particularly maternal health), and education. These, too, are where Aquino has sworn to make the greatest impact in his platform of government hinged on his campaign battle cry, “kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap.”

Our latest offering, a three-part report on the challenges that hamper the anti-poverty campaign of the Aquino administration, also reveals the not-so-cheery picture of the Philippines’s compliance with its MDG commitments.

Part 1 looks at how, despite constantly rising allocation for education, the Philippines continues to slide to lower net enrollment, cohort survival, and completion rates, and will most likely miss its Constitutionally-mandated goal of universal primary education for all school-age children.