DESPITE the fact that the country prides itself in having highly educated citizens, the present difficulties of rising poverty and years of low education budgets set by the national government is causing many children to drop out or all together lose interest in obtaining an education.

In a Policy Note Publication of the government think tank Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) titled “Ensuring a More Evidence-Based Policy for Basic Education,” Asian Development Bank (ADB) senior statistician Dalisay Maligalig and PIDS senior research fellow Jose Ramon Albert expressed deep concern that this may lead the country to fail in achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets set on universal primary education by 2015.

“While, at first glance, the Philippines seems to be on its way to reach this goal of universal primary education, looking closely at the figures, however, suggests that the country may be at risk of not achieving this goal by 2015,” the authors said.

Maligalig and Albert said that according to the Annual Poverty Indicator Survey (APIS) conducted in 2003 and 2004, there were about 716,000 and 750,000 children between the ages of 6 and 11 (the primary age group) who were not attending school.

In the APIS, all members of sampled households aged 6 to 24 are asked whether he/she is attending school and, if not, the reason for not attending.

The survey showed that about a fourth of the children who participated in the survey said that the lack of personal interest was the reason for not attending school, while around 3 out of 20 children cited the high cost of education.

Further, the proportion of pupils who started Grade 1 and reached Grade 5 has remained almost at the same level, 74 percent for the 1991 baseline and 75 percent for 2004. 

In terms of primary school net enrollment ratio and cohort survival rate, the authors said there was a decline of 3 percentage points and 4 percentage points, respectively, from 2001 to 2005, while the primary dropout rate increased by 0.8 percentage points.

For secondary schools, cohort survival rate dropped by almost 7 percentage points while dropout rate increased by 4 percentage points between 2001 and 2005.

“While education, as mentioned earlier, is a mechanism for the poor to exit poverty, the results of Apis 2002 and 2004, however, imply that the poor are less likely to obtain basic education. Children, especially from poor families, are forced to stay out of school not only because they cannot afford the costs but also because given the poor quality of education, it becomes more rational for them to work than to stay in school,” the authors said.

“Both cost and quality factors are inherently tied to poverty, as poor families have to sacrifice sending their children to school, especially during periods of crisis and poor families have limited means of sending their children to schools that provide quality education,” the authors added.

The study also stated that poverty also complicates gender issues surrounding education in the country. The authors said that a “new set of disparities between sexes may be in the offing,” since females in the country have a clear advantage over males at all education levels—primary, secondary, and tertiary.

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