Over 41T Unable to Pursue Education in CenVis-DSWD7

The Department of Social Welfare and Development’s (DSWD)-7 Listahanan or the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR) revealed that based on the household assessment result conducted by the office on July 2011 using the Proxy Means Test (PMT) about 41,634 individuals in Central Visayas ages 6 to 25 years old did not completed any grade level.

Kerwin R. Macopa, DSWD-7 Information Officer said data also showed that there are 22,524 poor individuals in Cebu who failed to attain the grade level. This is followed by Negros Oriental with 12,392, Bohol with 6,327 and Siquijor 391.

Macopa said there were also 96,937 poor individuals who finished elementary, 89,995 individuals completed high school, and 1,219 individuals were able to finish their college degree.

The DSWD information officer also explained that more than half or about 58% of the total poor individuals ages 6 to 25 yrs old were sent to public schools and only 1% studied in private schools.

Nevertheless, 41% poor individuals did not attend school because of poverty, Macopa added.

Macopa further stressed that DSWD uses PMT as a statistical model that estimates the income of households based on observable and verifiable variables such as housing conditions, household composition, access to basic services and education of household members.

Using this model, he said the government can predict the income of a household and compare it with the poverty threshold of the province and classify whether the household is poor or non-poor.

He hinted that DSWD shared and adopted the system as mechanism in identifying poor household as beneficiaries of different social protection programs and services like the PantawidPamilyang Pilipino Program, Sustainable Livelihood Program and the Social Pension for Indigent Senior Citizens.

DSWD-7 encourages Local Government Units (LGUs) and Non- Government Organization (NGO) to use the available data to
formulate appropriate social protection programs and services specifically to address the education problem in the region, Macopa said.

Macopa added that for the second round of household assessment, which will be done this year, new features were added to the PMT model to minimize the inclusion and exclusion error rates. These include two PMT sub-models
(one for the National Capital Region and one for all other regions), community variables through the Barangay Community Characteristics (BCC) as determinants of poverty status, and a second stage screener to flag possible inclusion errors or non-poor being included in the list of poor, Macopa revealed.

With these enhancements, the combined inclusion and exclusion error rates will decline from 22-35% in the old model to 6-19% in the new model. Macopa also said the second round of household assessment will be conducted in the second semester of 2014.