The National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) has released project-based poverty estimates for all cities and municipalities in the country for the year 2000.

 

This is the first time that city- and municipal-level poverty statistics have been generated. The estimates are part of the outputs of a special study entitled “Poverty Mapping in the Philippines,” which was conducted by the NSCB in its continuing effort to respond to the growing need for poverty statistics at lower levels of disaggregation. The project initiative was funded by the World Bank-Asia Europe Meeting (WB-ASEM) Trust Fund and was implemented from April 2004 to November 2005.

 

The NSCB Technical Staff and the Technical Committee on Poverty Statistics have recommended that these estimates be used as benchmark figures in monitoring the Millennium Development Goal on income poverty at the local level. These city- and municipal-level estimates also enhance and complement the official poverty statistics being released by the NSCB at the national, regional, and provincial levels.

 

The NSCB has been producing official poverty estimates since 1985, initially, at the national and regional levels, and then with provincial breakdown starting with the 1997 estimates. These are based on the income and expenditure data derived from the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), which are released by the National Statistics Office (NSO) every three years. However, since the FIES is only targeted to produce reliable estimates at the regional level, the standard errors of some of the results are quite large when estimating poverty at the provincial level. There has also been an increasing demand from policy makers and planners for a more disaggregated set of poverty statistics so that poverty reduction programs could be more effectively targeted to the areas in most need. The NSCB-WB project responds to this demand.

 

The methodology used by the Project was based on the small area estimation and poverty mapping technique developed by a WB research team, which combined survey and census data to produce reliable poverty estimates with a finer level of disaggregation. The data sources include the 2000 FIES, the 2000 Labor Force Survey (LFS), and the 2000 Census of Population and Housing (CPH), all conducted by NSO.

 

Based on the resulting estimates, the country’s 40 poorest municipalities in 2000 are given in Table 1. Majority of the municipalities that were considered poor in 2000 were in Mindanao, particularly in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao. The full text of the report on the study, including the poverty incidences for the 1,623 cities and municipalities covered by the 2000 census, as well as the provincial poverty maps, can be accessed at the poverty page of the NSCB website at http://www.nscb.gov.ph/poverty.

 

In recognition of the usefulness of these small area estimates of poverty for the monitoring and evaluation of local development plans, and as part of the advocacy activity to promote the project’s outputs and the small area poverty estimation methodology, the NSCB conducted the Second National Dissemination Forum on the Poverty Mapping Project on 28 July 2006 in Davao City. While the first dissemination forum conducted in Manila in October 2005 was participated in by representatives from the national government agencies, the academe, non-government organizations, and local government units (LGUs) in Metro Manila and nearby regions, the second dissemination forum was aimed at raising awareness among the various stakeholders of poverty statistics in the Visayas and Mindanao areas.

 

The Davao forum focused on the importance, usefulness, and reliability of the small area estimation and poverty mapping techniques in coming up with poverty estimates at the city/municipal level. Three representatives from the World Bank Office Manila participated in the forum - Ms. Lorraine Hawkins, Lead Health Specialist; Mr. Karl Chua of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (PREM); and Mr. Cesar Banzon of the Human Development Sector. More than 60 other participants attended the activity, including representatives from the provincial government units, NEDA Regional Offices, and NSCB Regional Divisions in the Visayas and Mindanao regions, the media, non-government organizations, and the private sector. Copies of the published report were distributed to the participants.

 

 

 

ROMULO A. VIROLA

Secretary General