Caring, competitive, clean

On one wall of Liza Alejandria Doring’s home, over the one-burner gas stove and a few pots and pans, a velvet 2011 calendar is displayed, with the words “Wishing Fairy.”

The wish of the 43-year-old housewife is for an extension of the conditional cash transfer program. Doring is one of the original beneficiaries of the CCT, which was started by the Arroyo administration with support from the World Bank in 2007. She gets P2,200 a month on condition that she keeps her two sons, aged 8 and 11, in school and she gets regular maternal health care.

It is the same wish of another CCT beneficiary, Mary Ann Macabane, who used to get P3,300 a month for her three children. But when the eldest, a boy who is hoping to take up computer engineering, turned 14, he was no longer covered by the program. Last year the amount was also reduced to P1,800 because Macabane, 38, was late in registering her daughter for second grade.

Macabane and Doring are neighbors in Barangay 201 in Pasay City’s Sitio Sapatasahai. It’s a warren of houses, many of them two or three stories high, patched together from flimsy plywood, bamboo slats and galvanized iron sheets, with hollow blocks for the lower walls.

Doring shares a one-room dwelling with an area of about 15 square meters with her husband Mario, a taxi driver, their two children, her sister and the latter’s six-month-old baby. Two sheets of cloth provide some privacy to anyone using the toilet. There is electricity but no running water.

Last Wednesday Doring scrubbed the linoleum flooring and spruced up the house for the visit of World Bank Group President Robert Zoellick, who was interested in getting a first-hand look at the progress of the CCT.

As neighborhood dogs howled at the visitors, Zoellick asked several of the beneficiaries what they thought of the program.

He reads about the CCT in this country and has discussed it with Philippine officials, he told me, but “it helps to come see.”

Despite criticism of the program as a dole-out that should not be prolonged, the Aquino administration has expanded the CCT, making it the largest among about 40 such programs worldwide that are currently being supported by the World Bank. Zoellick is looking for success stories that can be shared, or areas where the Bank can provide additional support. The program now includes livelihood assistance, and the government is studying proposals to extend coverage.

That would make Macabane happy. She herself dropped out of sixth grade in the barrio of Ma-ao in Negros Occidental because she had to help in the sugarcane fields after her father fell ill from tuberculosis.

The third of five siblings, Macabane saw the eldest die at 33, five months into a pregnancy. The baby did not survive. Her elder brother was shot dead at 29 years old. Macabane said he was mistaken for a member of a criminal gang.

At 12 she left Negros and worked as a maid in Paco, Manila, moving a few years later to Tondo for a similar job. At 19 she moved in with her cousins in Pasay and worked in a canteen, where she met her husband and soon became pregnant. After the third child, she had tubal ligation.

These days she is a full-time mom. She uses the P2,200 from the CCT to buy multivitamins for her children, pay miscellaneous school fees, and give them their daily school allowance of P20 each.

The allowance is spent mostly on snacks that are passed around daily on trays in the classrooms of the Kalayaan elementary and high school, where the average class size is more than 40. Before the practice was started, the faculty talked to the parents, Macabane said, telling them that money earned from the sale of the snacks helped augment the teachers’ meager take-home pay.

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Like Washington, the World Bank has been bullish about the Aquino administration and its emphasis on promoting transparency and good governance. Zoellick does not visit countries arbitrarily; this one to Manila is just the latest in the Bank’s gestures of support for P-Noy’s government.

Good governance is important particularly in ensuring the success of social safety nets such as the CCT. Proper taxes must be collected to finance the program, he noted.

Any anti-poverty program also needs good government to succeed. Job-generating investments are needed, and “corruption can be a real impediment to private businesses,” Zoellick said.

He acknowledged that compared with several other countries in the region, “the Philippines has struggled.”

Many people who have benefited from the old ways are resistant to reforms, he observed. “There are legacies to be overcome here,” he told me at the end of his visit in Pasay. “Some of these take time.”

But he has a generally optimistic outlook on the Philippines, including the CCT. “If the people don’t own it, it won’t work.”

He said he has met many Filipinos in his numerous travels overseas, and within the World Bank Group. “The Filipino people are extremely hardworking. You give them a chance and they’ll pour their heart and soul into it… they’re very devoted, hard workers. We’d like to create an environment where those skills can apply.”

The World Bank’s former country director, Bert Hofman, had a similar message Monday night, when he introduced to a small gathering his replacement, Motoo Konishi, who is assuming the post in February 2012.

“You can’t change 50 to 100 years in just one administration,” Bert told us. “I expect to see a caring, competitive and clean Philippines in 10 years.”

The gathering celebrated the partnership between the Philippines and the World Bank. On the stage a variation of the smiley symbol, wearing sunglasses, mouthed the words: “Phil good.”

Tourism officials might want to plagiarize the slogan. Bert said he picked it up from a forum on investment prospects on the Philippines, which was organized by Nomura Securities in Singapore, where he is now based as the Bank’s regional chief economist for East Asia and the Pacific. The tone of the forum, as the slogan indicates, was positive.

Bert doodled the smiley variation and emailed it to the WB’s senior external relations officer, Nor Gonzales. Her daughter Amihan, a preschool teacher, finessed the sketch. It captures the attitude in a country where you can see a lot of smiling faces even amid the poverty in Pasay’s Barangay 201.

“It’s a nice country,” Zoellick told me. “This is a society where if conditions are created, people can accomplish a lot.”