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A NUMBER
of poor Filipino families stand to gain from a
government and World Bank collaboration seeking directly
to intervene and break the vicious cycle that keeps
millions of households perpetually poor and dependent on
private or public-sector dole outs.
The
amount of the loan was not disclosed, but the broad aim
is to demonstrate that poverty can be licked and that
the government has a human face, provided that the poor
are also willing to invest in their own humanity.
Under
the plan, the government draws money from the World Bank
to fund a program that pays poor households just so the
adults send their children to school and have them
checked at the local health clinic regularly.
“We are
actually buying the time the children of poor households
would normally spend to help their parents earn money.
With the help of the World Bank, parents are encouraged
to send their children to school and to keep them
healthy in exchange for money,” Erniel B. Barrios, a
statistician from the University of the
Philippines,
said on Tuesday.
Barrios
is a holder of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Sterling
Professorial chair on government and statistics at UP.
On
Tuesday he reported on the results of a research on ways
by which low-income households may catch up with their
middle- and high-income neighbors.
His
paper, “Growth, Convergence and Spending Efficiency
Among Filipino Households,” cited the role of economic
entities in closing the gap between the low- and
high-income groups in the Philippines, a gap brought
about by “inequalities in terms of human capital.”
Human
capital pertains to education and health, according to
Barrios.
“The
solution is obviously to target the low-income
households and narrow the gap, not necessarily making
the poor surpass his high-income neighbor,” Barrios
said.
He
argued the traditional government approach of providing
universal education was “not enough” because the
perpetually poor cannot even hope of attaining good
health, much less education, because they are mired in
subsistence living.
“There
has to be interventions like the conditional cash
transfer,” said the statistician, who specializes in
rural agriculture research.
Barrios
also said building infrastructure in the rural areas is
just as important in making convergence, the term he
uses to illustrate the approximation of the impoverished
household to his more affluent neighbor.
Francisco Dakila Jr., officer-in-charge at the Center
for Monetary and Financial Policy at the BSP, lauded
Barrios for “going into the heart of the matter.”
More
than two-thirds of the low-income groups, those earning
no more than P29,547 a year, live in the rural areas of
the Philippines.
Middle-income families generally earn P65,966 a year
while high flyers earn at least P202,315 a year,
according to Barrios.
The
beneficiary families set for pilot-testing soon will be
picked from poor households in
Pasay City
and Callocan City as well as in the provinces of Misamis
Oriental and Agusan del Sur, Barrios said.
Deputy
BSP governor Diwa Guingundo noted the Latin American
experience of the same program proved that capacity
building by the government to sustain the program for
the long haul is important.
The
World Bank was not expected to fund the CCT program
forever, he said. |
