22,524 in Cebu City alone 41T kids in Reg-7 are uneducated

CEBU, Philippines - Around 41,000 children in Region-7 do not have access to education.

This data is based on the database of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD)’s Listahanan or the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR).

Based on the household assessment conducted by the office  on July 2011 using the Proxy Means Test (PMT), 41,634 individuals in Central Visayas ages six to 25 years have not completed any grade level.

 The biggest chunk of this number – 22,524 – is in Cebu followed by Negros Oriental with 12,392; Bohol with 6,327; and Siquijor with 391.

 Meanwhile, 96,937 poor individuals finished elementary; 89,995 individuals completed high school; and 1,219 individuals earned a college degree.

 To further illustrate, more than half or about 58 percent of  the total poor individuals ages six to 25 were sent to public schools and only one percent studied in private school. Nevertheless, 41 percent poor individuals are not able to attend school because of poverty.

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, the government can predict the income of a household and compare it to the poverty threshold of the province and classify whether the household is poor or not.

 DSWD shared and adopted the system as a mechanism in identifying poor households to determine beneficiaries of different social protection programs and services like the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), Sustainable Livelihood Program, and the Social Pension for Indigent Senior Citizens.

 DSWD-7 is encouraging local government units and non-government organizations to use available data in formulating appropriate social protection programs and services specifically to address the education problem in the region.

 New features have been added to the PMT model for the second round of household assessment to minimize inclusion and exclusion error rates. The assessment will be conducted during the second semester and will 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.

 With these enhancements, DSWD expects that the combined inclusion and exclusion error rates will decline from 22-35 percent in the old model to 6-19 percent in the new model. — /JMO (FREEMAN)