The National Household Targeting Unit (NHTU) is expected to come up with an information, education and communication (IEC) material on the regional profile of the poor based on the data generated from the second round of Listahanan assessment in 2015.

“As of now, we’re just awaiting for the final version of Listahanan 2 database to be released this year by Central Office. The said IEC material in the form of magazine is a statistical report… of poor families from a bird’s eye view level,” said Al-Nahda Nandu, Regional Associate Statistician of NHTU.

In 2016, the regional profile of the poor was officially launched in Zamboanga City. Nandu added that the IEC material will further advocate and promote the utilization of the database. The regional profile of the poor “can be used as reference by different social protection stakeholders in planning, policy and/or program crafting, and research, among others.”

Moreover, the profile will summarize and describe the poverty situation of Region IX. “At household level, we can determine the socio-economic information of the poor households such as but not limited to roster composition, type of housing unit (and construction materials used) and access to basic services, while based on an individual level, we can determine the sex, age, marital status, educational status, and employment status of the regional poor,” she added.

In terms of the Listahanan data to be incorporated in the IEC material, the National Household Targeting Office (NHTO) will be giving the official guidelines to all its regional counterparts anytime soon. Meanwhile, Nandu revealed that during the 2015 assessment, out of the 704,870 households assessed, 364,750 (or 1,924,318 individuals) are identified as poor.

The results also showed that 50% of the identified poor are children while majority or approx. 83% of them can be located in rural areas. Furthermore, 40% do not have access to safe main water and 46% likewise do not have access to electricity.

NHTU continues to invite stakeholders to enter into MOA on data sharing

“As of now, we continue to encourage our partners to utilize Listahanan 2. By having them peeked into our data, they may explore the idea of having a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with us for them to be able to access our database or at least request statistics from us. In fact, a number of LGUs and NGAs have already requested from us earlier this year,” said Nandu.

She also emphasized that the data can be requested for free. “Albeit limited only to poor households, our data are comprehensive. The technical experts who crafted the tool used to measure whether a certain household is poor or not is composed of the social welfare agency, NSO (now Philippine Statistics Authority), National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB), University of the Philippines- Diliman, Pulse Asia, and Social Weather Stations (SWS).”

The National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR) or commonly known as Listahanan, is a database of poor families and/or households consisting of their identification, socio-economic information, and household rosters. These are gathered by the Proxy Means Test (PMT), a statistical model that estimates household income using proxy variables or income predictors. ###