BULUAN, Maguindanao—Government statistics from official poverty surveys are largely based on average monthly family income and costs of expenditures to meet food and non-food requirements, officials said.
But for Maguindanao Gov. Esmael Mangudadatu, poverty incidence could have been expressed for the province, if the people’s access to free education and healthcare, potable water and other social services were integrated and factored-in in all poverty surveys and indices.
Maguindanao had better statistics in the think-tank group Ibon Foundation’s poverty surveys, which considered those factors as access to free education, healthcare and potable water and other social services.
At the sidelight of Provincial Peace and Order Council meeting on Wednesday, Mangudadatu said many student-beneficiaries of the Maguindanao Program for Educational Assistance and Community Empowerment have earned tertiary degrees in different fields of profession—thus, effectively reducing the incidence of college dropouts in the province.
The national government’s free college education program also started this school year in many of the country’s 81 provinces.
Dr. Tahir Sulaik, head of the Integrated Provincial health Office, said the IPHO-Maguindanao is equipped with modern medical facilities like CT-Scan and Hemodialysis machines, and has eight upgraded hospitals under its operational supervision.
Sulaik said residents did not need to go to Davao City to avail of quality medical services and tests, since it’s all for free of charge in Maguindanao.
Emma Ali, head of the Provincial Social Welfare Development Office, said only 170,000 have been validated out of the total 290,000 individuals listed beneficiaries of the Pantawid Pampamiliang Pilipino Program at ARMM municipal and barangay levels.
Ali said of the 90,000 students listed in the PSWDO records as enrolled students, only more than 60,000 were validated when lists were cross-matched with the Department of Education of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
In the listing of the Department of Social Welfare and Development-ARMM of poor families for the Conditional Cash Transfer program, access to employment, education and potable water were also factored in.
Ali said Manila-based evaluating teams would consider more than 30,000 “missing” school children as those in the category of without access to education—and constitute an added figure to local poverty statistics by CCT standards.
She said most of the children who left schooling are living in conflict-affected areas in the so-called SPMS (Saudi-Pagatin-Mamasapano-Sharif Aguak) Box, an occasional subject of intense military operations against extremist dissidents.
Maguindanao officials noted that other Mindanao provinces landed on top 15 of the country’s poorest provinces, probably for similar reason.
The Philippine Statistics Authority utilized the Family Income and Expenditure Survey determinants in its 2018 survey, as it was in 2015 and the past censuses conducted by its forerunner National Statistics Office.