Using recent nationally representative survey data and administrative records from relevant government agencies, this report aims to contribute in understanding these interacting factors that cause the impoverished conditions of Filipino children. In particular, it comprehensively profiles the Filipino children in terms of income poverty, access to basic amenities, education, health and nutrition, and other aspects of well-being. It serves as an update to the 2010 Philippine report under the UNICEF's Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities. This latest version attempts to go deeper by analysing how movement in and out of poverty affects children. It recognizes that the poor is not a homogenous group. There are those who are persistently poor because of lack of appropriate qualifications and deficient employability skills, but there are also those who, even with relatively high educational attainment, are too vulnerable that an economic shock or natural calamity can easily pull them down to the bottom of the social ladder.
Using panel data from the Philippines' Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), this paper also looks into how such dynamics affects children's welfare. Meanwhile, to complement the profile on child poverty, this paper scrutinizes how the government has faired so far in addressing poverty via its biggest social protection programme, the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps). The brief review also touches on a variant of the Pantawid Pamilya that caters to street families, particularly its design and targeting strategy, and other Department of Social Welfare and Development programmes involving the welfare of children.
This report emphasizes the spatial dimension, owing to the archipelagic nature of the Philippines. The concept of deprivation is drawn from the methodology developed in the UNICEF’s Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities. Whenever possible, the household surveys---the FIES and the Annual Poverty Indicator Survey (APIS), the key sources of information for this report but which provide only household characteristics---were merged with their parent survey, the Labor Force Survey, to obtain individual-level characteristics of family members. Therefore, the household panel dataset consisting of the 2003, 2006 and 2009 rounds of the FIES and used to analyse the movements of households in and out of poverty, also contains the individual information of family members, making a rich and in-depth profiling possible.
