The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) will soon be collecting child poverty data every two years to better monitor the country’s efforts in improving the lives of millions of Filipino children nationwide.
Addressing child poverty is one of the targets under Goal 1 of the Sustainable Development Goals, which aims to end poverty worldwide by 2030.
Currently, child poverty data is collected every three years, which prevents better monitoring of the country’s progress in lifting millions of Filipino children from poverty.
“Child [below 18 years old according to Republic Act 7610] poverty stats [incidence] is the proportion of children belonging to poor families to the total number of children,” National Statistician Lisa Grace S. Bersales told the BusinessMirror.
“Major data gaps [include] absence of lower-level geographic disaggregation, disability status, informal sector; frequency is every three years; existing official income poverty estimates cannot give a measure of deprivations on basic needs,” she added.
Apart from the frequency, Bersales said the PSA will also implement improvements in methodology to child poverty statistics. This will make the data a more reliable basis for the country’s small area estimates for municipal poverty statistics.
Bersales said the 2020 census will also include disability questions, which will serve as inputs in coming up with estimates by disability status.
The PSA will also generate informal sector and employment data, as well as study the development of multidimensional poverty index to identify deprivations on basic needs.
Based on the latest PSA data on children, there are a total of 38.36 million children in the Philippines. This is composed of 19.78 million boys and 18.58 million girls.
Child poverty is composed of multiple deprivations. In 2013 11.6 percent of children experienced severe deprivation in education; 11.1 percent, shelter; 9.7 percent, sanitation; 9.1 percent, information; and 0.3 percent, water.
This means children aged 6 to 17 years old are not educated; their shelter has no floor material; they have no toilet/field/bush; they have no radio, television, landline telephone, cellular phone and personal computer; and do not have access to water, even to rivers/streams/ponds/lakes.