Poverty

In their rush to approve the Magna Carta of the Poor, lawmakers put in funding provisions that raised questions from the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) and the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), President Benigno Aquino III said on Tuesday.

Authors of the proposed Magna Carta for the Poor are aghast that President Benigno Aquino III vetoed the measure intended to guarantee that the downtrodden and impoverished would get opportunities to improve their plight, believing there was no reason to deny them any kind of help they could get.

The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) on Tuesday criticized President Benigno Aquino 3rd’s decision to veto the proposed Magna Carta for the Poor, a measure which seeks to provide indigents shelter, livelihood, education and health services.

It sounds like funding for a drinking session but it is what the latest government antipoverty program is called. The program, dubbed Bottoms-Up-Budget (BUB), will set aside P20 billion for projects to be identified by mayors of the country’s poorest provinces as part of the Aquino administration’s efforts to lift more families from poverty.

MANILA (UPDATED) – President Aquino said he vetoed the proposed Magna Carta for the Poor because its implementation could not be funded.

MANILA, Philippines — He could have played cute and signed it into law. But without a P3.044-trillion budget to fulfill the basic needs of the poor right away, the government would have been haled to court.

MANILA – President Benigno Aquino III has vetoed the Magna Carta for the Poor, saying most of its provisions were unrealistic and were meant only to earn brownie points.

The government will complete the distribution of cash grants to poor families throughout the country before March 29 to avoid being accused of using the program to further the election chances of administration candidates.

THE Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) said the government’s Conditional Cash-Transfer (CCT) Program will continue but no money will be released for the duration of a ban on disbursement of public funds during the campaign period for the May midterm elections. It added that the move would shield the CCT Program from politics.…

MANILA – Optimism is soaring that the Philippines is finally becoming an Asian tiger economy, but critics caution a tiny elite that has long dominated is amassing most of the new wealth while the poor miss out.

MANILA, Philippines – The Department of Social Work and Development’s Conditional Cash Transfer program is set to achieve its goals of promoting investments in the health and education of its beneficiaries, the World Bank reported on Friday.

THE LAST TIME that I spoke before the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) was six years ago, in January 2007, when international confidence in the Philippines was improving because of rosy economic indicators — budget deficit and interest rates were down; inflation was under control; the stock market and foreign exchange reserves were up;…

MANILA – Forget what you learned about poverty causing crime. According to the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB), crime is more a function of income inequality.

The government is mulling measuring the number of poor Filipinos in terms of consumption instead of earnings as it fine-tunes a new bi-annual state-funded survey on poverty to be released next month, the country’s top economist said.

MANILA, Philippines – If a family of 5 wants to get out and stay out of poverty, the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) estimates it needs P258.96 per day. This is equivalent to an average income of around P7,768.80 per month or P93,225.60 per year.

NEW YORK — A country’s economic success depends on the education, skills, and health of its population. When its young people are healthy and well educated, they can find gainful employment, achieve dignity, and succeed in adjusting to the fluctuations of the global labor market. Businesses invest more, knowing that their workers will be productive.…

The effectiveness of President Aquino’s costly and at the same time controversial conditional cash transfer (CCT) program was again in the limelight after a Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey showed a marked increased in self-rated poverty, prompting the Palace to counter that the CCT is working since the hunger incidence in the same survey was…

HUNGER MAY HAVE HIT fewer Filipino families as 2012 drew to a close but more consider themselves mahirap, the Social Weather Stations (SWS) said in a new report. The Hunger Games lead fan favorites at People’s Choice awardsFewer families go hungryHunger up among familiesHunger Games success ‘mind-blowing’ for HutchersonHunger Games trilogy grows to four, as…

The House opposition bloc on Saturday demanded a review of the government’s dole program, called conditional cash transfer (CCT), because it has been ineffective in uplifting the lives of the poorest of the poor.

HUNGER AMONG Filipino families fell to a one and a half-year low in December, the Social Weather Stations (SWS) said in a new report, with an estimated one million households no longer having experienced lacking anything to eat.

MANILA, Philippines – Tonight, as we go to bed, one in 8 people will sleep on an empty stomach. There are about 870 million people in the world who suffer from hunger due to food scarcity based on Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data.

Most everyone agrees that the announcement this week of a 7.1 percent growth in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP, or the sum total of goods and services produced by a country) for the third quarter was an unexpected surprise, one that bodes well for the Philippines’ short to medium-term prospects.

MANILA, Philippines — If the high unemployment rate and poverty incidence were to serve as basis for determining economic growth, government’s claim that it accelerated to 7.1 percent for the third quarter of this year sounds incredulous, militant lawmakers said Thursday.

The Philippines’ Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program has achieved better targeting outcomes compared to similar programs in other countries where it has been implemented for decades, the Asian Development Bank said.

The Philippines has a huge market potential for increasing so-called inclusive businesses (IBs) that could help address poverty, a study prepared for the Asian Development Bank (ADB) disclosed.

MANILA, Philippines – If the Philippines wants to significantly increase Filipinos’ incomes in the next 15 years, it must post an average annual growth of 6.7% during the period.

THE anti-poverty program isn’t working. That’s the verdict reached by two United Nations agencies, namely, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, and the Aquino administration ought to listen to what they have to say.

Despite the Commission on Audit (CoA) reporting huge slippages in the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) which is the government’s term for the conditional cash transfer (CCT) program, the Palace said the Aquino administration does not have any plan to introduce revisions in the mechanism of the doleout program.

MANILA, Philippines – Presidential spokesperson Edwin Lacierda blamed anew the Arroyo administration for the Philippine’s woeful performance in fulfiling the Millennium Development Goals pegged by the United Nations.

JAKARTA – The Philippines’ performance in meeting its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has remained dismal with barely three years into the deadline to achieve the objectives set by United Nations member-states, according to a UN report.