by Alex Roldan
Solving the problem of poverty has been a lifelong quest for every government. In the Philippines the controversial RH Bill is supposed to respond to the growing population that logically contributes to the increasing number of population joining the poor sector.
I believe that instead of debating if the RH bill is good or bad, immoral or protection of reproductive right, the best thing to do is to check the country’s poverty data. Sadly, statistics on the economic situation of the people, despite their availability, are most often ignored, contested or simply sidelined instead of using these data as guide in policy and resource allocation decisions.
In fighting poverty, good information will tell you where to best deploy your resources to go where they help the poor most. The more you know about the problem, the easier to beat it – it will tell you where to best deploy your resource, personnel, doctors, auditors or even armies!
Instead of debating on broad terms, the government must produce accurate, frequent, comprehensive, consistent and accessible data for the different sectors to understand and find their place in this struggle. It is very frustrating particularly to some civil societies who are into development work who try hard to establish their own data that will guide their poverty alleviation interventions only to end up being chastised for their approaches in responding to poverty issues. Without good data, we just end up implementing paltry, palliative interventions and, worse, mistakes that are being repeated again and again.
Every year the government formulates plans and specific goals are established. In simple term, the plan is their commitment to justify tax collection. In the plans they promise to change the country’s condition to better. They promise that infant mortality will fall, number of children that will be vaccinated, children that will be educated, and even the hotly debated issue of the day like the number of women with access to reproductive health care, robust economy and the like. What is normally reported are simply those that have good media interest that they consider a “success” but none about what failed! In development parlance, monitoring an evaluation which are very important, have not been established. A good M and E could have shed light on what works and what does not work.
Not only that, the government should include data that pertains to public subsidies, such as what privatization did to public enterprises or government owned and controlled corporations which rely on government subsidies.
Though we have some government and private institutions that are gathering some of these data, it is not readily accessible. The government census will tell us the trend of the condition of the population, but trying to determine who exactly benefits from every peso the government spends or what the technocrats call “benefit incidence analysis” is the big question. Those all-important household surveys, when they exist, get published years after they are collected. Millions are rightly being spent to upgrade statistical capacity. But it takes a long, long while before you see results, which explains why many, particularly politicians, rarely care about it.
Take health for example, we use people’s money to bankroll public hospitals and purchase medicines. But the main beneficiaries of subsidized hospitals are the rich (who could pay) not really the poor. Statistical data let you quantify these aberrations and could help in redirecting the resources towards those that really need them.
Another glaring example is the unemployment data. Government claims a declining trend in unemployment and availability of jobs, but all end up with the familiar statement from authorities of “job mismatch.” Nobody really knows the real score. We should stop experimenting with people. We can evaluate everything – from giving subsidized fertilizer to farmers or cheap loans to micro-entrepreneurs, as long as we have data.
With great certainty the country needs a good database of the poverty situation. We are already in the digital age and access to important information should be much easier to gather and disseminated. If the purpose is to unite the effort to fight poverty, then we should start with a good and accessible information base.
Data speak. Just listen so we can win the war against poverty.
For comments, e-mail to: roldanalex@yahoo.com
