Pathways out of poverty

THE UNITED Nations’ Millennium Development Goals are very specific targets agreed on by countries, including the Philippines. Most of these goals have a deadline by 2015 using 1990 as the baseline against which progress is gauged. These goals are:

Map Insights — Junie Del Mundo: “Global perspectives and domestic dynamics”

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. Part of this goal is to halve the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day.

2. Achieve universal primary education.

3. Promote gender equality and empower women.

4. Reduce child mortality.

5. Improve maternal health.

6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.

7. Ensure environmental sustainability.

8. Develop a global partnership for development.

I would like to focus my discussion on the poverty goal. For the Philippines, that means bringing down poverty level from 33% in 1990. As of 2012, official poverty statistics show that we are still at 27.9%. To expect that we can bring this down to 16.5% by next year is almost impossible.

Our level of poverty is totally unacceptable. Pope Francis, in his recent apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, noted: “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape (ref. no. 53).”

A foreigner who comes to the Philippines gets totally scandalized with this situation. While they see so many luxury cars in the streets and mansions in Metro Manila, just on the curb and side streets they see so many poor people and their shanties stacked like playing cards. How can we Filipinos tolerate such a disparity and injustice, they ask?

As we begin a new year, we should seriously ask the question: how can we solve this problem? This is not for government alone but for every thinking Filipino. The book that was recently published by the University of Asia and the Pacific entitled 4Es: Pathways Out of Poverty proposes solutions to this problem. Here are excerpts from the book.

“Poverty remains largely a rural phenomenon. Thus, focus was given on the role of agriculture and rural development in licking this problem. Today, the poorest of the poor are the farmers, the fishermen, and the kaingineros, those who eke out a living in the sector economists generally refer to as agriculture.

“Because of this situation, young people are not interested to pursue careers related to agriculture. Farmers themselves tell their sons and daughters who are college-bound to take courses other than agriculture. They simply do not want their children to experience the hardships they themselves had to go through to survive.”

The book outlines four pathways out of poverty. These are education, entrepreneurship, environment, and enablers.

Education tops the list for pathways out of the Filipinos’ poverty. Education in the higher levels is the great equalizer. It opens up opportunities for people who have already gone through basic education. Thus, in our country, parents save and scrimp on other necessities just to be able to send their children to college.

Unfortunately, we are seeing the great mismatch between the stuff that is taken up in college and what is demanded by the employers. Thus, there exists the phenomenon of a large number of college graduates who cannot find work appropriate to their degrees. In the agricultural and rural areas, young people are leaving in favor of jobs in the cities and urban areas. They dislike working on the soil and dirtying their hands with menial work. The result is the reliance of the country on imports to supply food requirements.

There is therefore a need to provide education to answer the needs of the rural areas so that young people can see a future in careers related to agriculture, such as farm managers, farm supervisors, and “agripreneurs.”

This is the idea behind the Family Farm Schools, Rural Development Schools, and Farm Business Schools. The government’s move to introduce the K to 12 program for basic education is also a step in the right direction. Here, students in the senior high schools are given a choice to specialize in technical-vocational courses, the arts, sports, and entrepreneurship. The hope is that graduates of the high schools will have an opportunity for other options.

Entrepreneurship is the second in the list of pathways out of poverty. Entrepreneurship is the driving force in the economy that creates wealth, introduces new products, and provides employment opportunities to many people.

Philippine education has been geared too much towards graduates getting employed or working for someone else. This has been the case for many decades until the idea of producing graduates to start their own businesses started in the late 1990s.

But for entrepreneurs to thrive, they need training in the various aspects of business marketing, production, finance, and human resource management, among others. But more than the theories, they also need practical experience via on-the-job training, internships, and similar schemes. These elements should be built into the program, to give budding entrepreneurs a head start in their business ventures.

Environment comes third in the list of pathways out of poverty. Environment problems present a host of opportunities for entrepreneurs willing to take the challenge of solving these problems. In situations where people are desperate to make a living, the first casualty is usually the environment. Cases like slash and burn agriculture (kaingin), destruction of coral areas due to dynamite fishing, conversion of mangrove forests to fishponds are just examples of how such unsustainable practices damage fragile environments.

The book shows that there are, in fact, ways of solving these problems. The solutions given show how people in the communities living in these areas can be mobilized as environment stewards.

The fourth in the list is made up of “enablers.” Referred to is a host of institutions needed to provide support for entrepreneurship to thrive in agricultural and rural areas.

These enablers are collectively called institutional infrastructure. These institutions can be found in government, business, and social sectors. Critical from the government sector are support services for training, extension, and an honest-to-goodness agrarian reform program.

From the business sector, there is a need for business enterprises which exercise in earnest corporate citizenship or corporate social responsibility. From the social sector is the crucial role to be played by social enterprises, cooperatives, and the academe in bringing about real social change for the benefit of those who have less in life.

Back to the question: how we Filipinos can tolerate such an injustice called poverty? We should really examine ourselves and reflect on the words of Pope Francis. “Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us” (ref. no. 54).

It is not too late to make a good new year’s resolution. –Jose Rene C. Gayo, Businessworld

(This article reflects the personal opinion of the author and does not reflect the official stand of the Management Association of the Philippines. The author is a member of the MAP Agribusiness and Countryside Development Committee, and the Project Manager of the Farm Business School project of MAP and Dean of the MFI Farm Business School. Send feedback to mapsecretariat@gmail.com and renegayo@gmail.com. For previous articles, visit www.map.org.ph.)