1 million volunteers against poverty to be mobilized

CEBU, Philippines —  The National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC) will mobilize up to one million volunteers to serve as local community partners across 42,000 barangays in the country to achieve its objective of ending poverty for six to eight million poor Filipinos by 2022.

This is part of NAPC’s volunteer program called Ka-Sambayanihan, said NAPC head Secretary Noel Felongco during the quarterly conference of the Kilusang Pagbabago (KP) Visayas at the OPASCOR Social Hall yesterday.

President RodrigoDuterte said during his recent State of the Nation Address (SONA) that poverty incidence fell from 27.6 percent in the first half of 2015 to 21 percent in the first half of 2018.

“The most important number, though, is the six million Filipinos we need to pull out from poverty,” Duterte told members of Congress and the Filipino people before national television.

Felongco said that poverty incidence in 2018 declined but 23.1 million Filipinos remained living below poverty line and this remains a big challenge of the Duterte administration.

 Felongco said they received marching order from Duterte to bring down the poverty level by 2022 to six to eight million Filipinos.

The Nagkaisa ng Sambayanihan Laban sa Kahirapan, which is the NAPC volunteer program, will be organized to assist in the validation of the monitoring and implementation of the anti-poverty programs and projects at the barangay level.

“This kind of system diin mopili og usa ka leader to look after 50 to 100 households kung na implement ba og sakto ang mga programa sa gobyerno,” said Felongco.

To localize Sambayanihan, the NAPC adopts Sambarangayan which is based on the Village Eco-Governance Development Framework.

Under the Sambarangayan, the NAPC will focus on convergence of government programs, projects and activity at the community level, capacity building of the community members and prototype project development.

  Kilusang Pagbabago is the grassroots movement of pro-Duterte volunteers formed shortly after the 2016 elections to serve as the administration’s partner for change. — LPM (FREEMAN)