UNDP Poverty Report 2000

Targeting Poor Families

The basis for the Philippine poverty programme is the Social Reform and Poverty Alleviation Act passed by Congress in late 1997, the last year of Fidel Ramos's administration. Unless amended or repealed, it is binding on future administrations.

The act's Social Reform Agenda had flagship programmes explicitly targeted to such disadvantaged groups as farmers, landless rural workers, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, informal sector workers and the urban poor. But the new administration of Joseph Estrada has new priorities, focusing the poverty programme on five components: ensuring food security, modernizing agriculture and fisheries, providing low-cost housing, protecting the poor against crime and violence and actively involving local government in the programme.

Financing is appropriated by Congress and allocated to a Poverty Alleviation Fund, which then disburses it to programmes of regular line agencies. Congress's participation implies that funding is always subject to some political negotiation, but it has never exceeded 1% of the government's total budget.

The National Anti-poverty Commission, chaired by the president and including government officials and nominated representatives of civil society, oversees and coordinates the poverty programme. The commission has a secretariat currently headed by the department secretary for agrarian reform, but it lacks adequate staff. Moreover, it does not directly imple-ment programmes or disburse funds, relying instead on the cooperation of line agencies and local government.

Poverty Reduction Targets

In addition to a stand-alone poverty programme, the Philippines has a better-financed Medium-Term Development Plan (covering 1999 - 2004). Because the plan emphasizes the allocation of resources to agricultural production and rural development, it is likely to have more impact on poverty than the targeted interventions.

The plan calls for reducing overall income poverty from 32% in 1997 to about 26% in 2004. But it does not specify operational links with the poverty programme. The National Anti-poverty Commission still calls for reducing poverty to 20% by 2004. But even the less ambitious target of the development plan will require concerted efforts because the estimate of 32% in 1997 did not take into account the likely rise in poverty due to the Asian financial crisis and bad weather.

The National Economic and Development Authority, the country's planning authority, already serves as a secretariat for the day-to-day activi-ties of cabinet-level interagency committees. So the cross-cutting structure of the National Anti-poverty Commission looks like a superfluous duplication - one risk of setting up separate poverty programmes that are not well integrated with general socio-economic policy-making.

In principle the poverty programme should be decentralized to local governments, but most are still at an early stage in assuming new responsibilities, with some delays caused by the change in national administration. Identifying the poor and monitoring impacts are still challenges - as in many poverty programmes. An Annual Poverty Indicators Survey supplies informa-tion at the provincial level on income, spending and other correlates of income poverty. The human develop-ment index has been proposed as a monitoring tool, but data on life expectancy and literacy are not col-lected frequently enough to support its use. The most developed system for targeting is the minimum basic needs information system, which supplies detailed data at the village level, but not enough local govern-ments use it to guide policy-making.

Targeting 100 Poor Families

An unusual and controversial feature of the current poverty programme is its attempt to focus assistance by identifying the 100 poorest families in each barangay, or village. Since governors, mayors and village heads are all involved in selecting the families - with little apparent input from civil society organizations - critics claim that the process has inevitably become politicized. Moreover, the effort would reach only about 16,000 families in the entire country.

The government's most successful anti-poverty intervention has been the Comprehensive and Integrated Delivery of Social Services Programme, which since 1994 has mobilized communities to define priorities and pool resources from government, civil society organizations and people's organizations to target people's mini-mum basic needs. But government expenditures on basic social services remain low - at about 2% of GNP. And the poverty programme has had less success in combining improve-ments in people's basic capabilities with substantial enhancements of their job and income prospects.

That requires a pro-poor national policy environment and greater concern for rising inequality. Even though the Gini coefficient of income distribution has steadily worsened, to 0.49, government policies still seem to assume that liberal economic policies and broad-based growth will lead to greater equity in the distribution of income.