The House of Representatives has supported a bill establishing a consolidated poverty data collection system which shall generate updated and disaggregated data necessary in targeting beneficiaries and ensure they shall have access to social protection and welfare programs that address their minimum basic needs.
House Bill 8217, which has been approved on second reading, provides that the CPDC system shall also help the government in conducting more comprehensive poverty analysis and needs prioritization as well as designing appropriate policies, intervention and monitoring impact over time.
Principally authored by Rep. Jose Enrique Garcia III of Bataan, the bill declares that the use of the CPDC system is in pursuant to the policy of the State to free the people from poverty through policies that provide adequate social services, deliver a rising standard of living, promote full employment, and make available an improved life for all.
As defined in the bill, the CPDC system refers to the “generation of data at the local level which serves as basis in targeting poor households in the planning, budgeting, and implementation of government programs geared towards poverty alleviation.” This system merges the methodologies used in data collection activities of all national agencies, geotagging, and the Community Based Monitoring.
The CPDC system entails a census of households undertaken by the local government units with the participation of the community using accelerated poverty profiling system in the data-collection, processing, mapping and analysis of data.
Meanwhile, the bill refers to geotagging as the “process of generating metadata about government projects through various media and of uploading to a web-based application.” This enables the mapping of all areas in the country and allows the government, the citizenry, and other stakeholders to check the progress of projects in real time.
The bill mandates the establishment of a CPDC system in every LGU as an economic and social tool towards the formulation and implementation of poverty alleviation and development programs which are specific, targeted and responsive to the basic needs of the poor.
Each LGU shall be the primary data collecting authority within its locality.
For this purpose, each LGU shall have a statistician whose primary function is data collection, preservation, and safekeeping of the data retained at the city or municipal level.
Regular and synchronized data collection shall be conducted by every LGU at an interval not longer than every three years for the first six years of implementation of the Act.
Annual synchronized data collection shall be done thereafter.
The Philippine Statistics Authority shall be the lead agency in implementing the CPDC system. It shall capacitate the LGUs in collecting poverty data at the local level through the Philippine Statistical Research and Training Institute, in collaboration with state colleges and universities.
The Department of Information and Communications Technology shall develop institutional arrangements on data-sharing while the Department of the Interior and Local Government shall regularly disseminate information relating to activities of the CPDC system.
Through an institutional arrangement, national government agencies shall request the PSA for specific CPDC system data for use in their particular social protection and welfare programs and projects.
The right to privacy of every respondent is inviolable. Participation in all data collection activities shall be purely voluntary.
The budget for implementing the Act shall be included in the PSA budget under the annual General Appropriations Act.
Within 90 days from the effectivity of the “CPDC System Act”, the PSA, in consultation with the different national agencies, the League of Municipalities of the Philippines and the League of Cities of the Philippines, shall promulgate the implementing rules and regulations of the Act.
Garcia said to wage a successful war against poverty, it is important to know who the poor are, where they are, and why they remain to be poor.
“There is very little, up-to-date, and disaggregated data available relating to the different dimensions of poverty,” said Garcia.
He said under the bill, the data collected shall form part of a nationwide databank that may be used by national government agencies and LGUs in formulating and implementing focused and targeted poverty alleviation and development programs, and in monitoring the impacts of these program on the quality of life of Filipinos over time.