Tess Bacalla
MANILA, Oct 5 2010 (IPS) – His bones pushing against his skin, Lean Ray Francisco has been feeding on rice coffee, or coffee made from roasted rice, and rice water left over from boiling rice for most of his three years.
Children make up nearly half of poor Filipinos, new figures show. Credit: Tess Bacalla/IPS
Left in the care of his grandmother when his mother moved out of their rural town to work as a restaurant helper elsewhere in the Philippines, and abandoned by this father, Lean spends his days lying on a thin blanket on the floor of their decrepit home, turning more frail by the day.
But his is far from a unique case in Pasacao, a town in south central Camarines Sur province in the Philippines. Eighty percent of its children were found malnourished after community health workers weighed the town s youngsters, says journalist Kara David, who reported on Lean s condition for a major broadcasting network, GMA 7.
Elsewhere in this South-east Asian country, 47 percent or 12.8 million children under the age of 15, out of some 27.6 million poor Filipinos, are suffering from poverty, which is shown in different ways, including malnutrition.
This latest figure on the incidence of child poverty in the Philippines represents a spike of almost 4 percentage points from 2003, or about one million children, based on a joint study by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS), a government think tank, and the United Nations Children s Fund (UNICEF).
Such findings tell us that there is a long way to go in order to lift millions of children out of poverty, said UNICEF Country Representative Vanessa Tobin at the September 2010 launch of the Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities: The Case of the Philippines . They confirm that children make up a significant number of the poor in this country of 94 million people and that their plight has not improved much over the last two decades.
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Poverty incidence among Filipino families rose from 24.4 percent to 26.9 percent between 2003 and 2006, says the study. As poverty worsens among households, more children are deprived of their basic needs, including education or health.
Child poverty is defined in two ways: child income poverty, which is based on family income, and child deprivation, which is measured through non- income indicators such as access to food, shelter, sanitation facilities, and water.
Malnutrition, for instance, now afflicts more Filipino children than before. In the 0-5 age group, the proportion of underweight children rose 1.6 percent between 2003 and 2006. This marked the largest rise in the prevalence of underweight, said the study.
The number of children living in informal settlements has doubled to 1.2 million between 1985 and 2006. Those deprived of decent shelter have grown from 301,000 children in 2000 to 307,000 in 2006. The number of children aged 6-16 who are not attending school rose from 1.8 million in 2002 to 2.2 million in 2007, based on the Annual Poverty Indicator Survey. Children in households with the lowest incomes are highly likely to suffer multiple deprivations, says Tobin. An estimated 17,000 Filipino children are experiencing simultaneous deprivations, such as those involving food, education and shelter.
Social worker Precila Parana, programme director of the Alay Pag-asa (Give Hope) Christian Foundation Inc says the plight of the children that her institution supports confirms to her that poverty incidence has gone from bad to worse in the last few years.
Many of these children have been forced into scavenging to survive, says Parana. They are called mangangalakal (which literally means trader but is a euphemism for scavenger), she said.
The foundation spends more on food today on its feeding programme not because it has more children, but because more children are coming to its pre-school centre extremely starved, she explains.
Parana says their homes are often woefully inadequate without windows and so cramped they can hardly fit more than four children.
The PIDS-UNICEF child poverty report based in part on the Philippines latest official poverty statistics generated in 2006 stated that over the past two decades, the well-being of Filipino children below 15 years old has been deteriorating . The almost 13 million children in income poverty is almost the same in magnitude and character as the 1985 level, it added.
The fact remains that there are more poor children now than ever before, the report concluded.
Augusto Rodriguez, UNICEF special policy specialist, says the findings of PIDS and UNICEF highlight the need for more targeted and focused programmes for children.
Maria Elena Caraballo, deputy executive director of the Council for the Welfare of Children, says she was not surprised by the latest study on child poverty in the Philippines.
But it at least provides a very graphic picture of the state of Filipino children today and in that sense is a very positive development , she explains, expressing hope that it would lead to effective monitoring of government programmes for children.
The government has a conditional cash transfer programme that extends direct financial aid to 582,000 poorest Filipino families, provided, among others, that their children remain in school and get regular health checkups.
We must do more, stressed UNICEF s Tobin. We must ensure we don t leave out those families who are under the radar of national registration schemes. Those living under bridges, or along rivers or in far flung mountains must not be left out.
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