MARAWI
CITY, Lanao del Sur, June 17 (PIA) --- The Autonomous Region in Muslim
Mindanao (ARMM) strengthens its anti-poverty drive as it embarked on an
inter-agency initiative that would “significantly and sustainably reduce
poverty incidence among its population.”
Early this year,
ARMM launched the national government’s Accelerated and Sustainable
Anti-Poverty Program (ASAPP), an inter-agency effort “that seeks to
reduce poverty by creating sustainable employment and income-generating
opportunities for the poor,” said Janice Musali, the region’s Fisheries
and Aquatic Resources director and ASAPP lead convenor for the ARMM.
Sulu,
a component province of ARMM, has one of the highest number of
poverty-stricken residents identified under ASAPP. The province has
122,218 identified as poor out of its 718,290 total population, as of
the 2010 census.
ARMM Governor Mujiv Hataman said the high
poverty rate in the region continues to be a challenge to the regional
government, but ASAPP will “help more Filipinos break away from the
poverty threshold.”
“We are optimistic that this will be
addressed more effectively with the introduction of ASAPP, the efforts
of the Provincial Government of Sulu, and the convergence of livelihood
and development programs of the working ARMM government,” Gov. Hataman
said.
“ASAPP is a poverty reduction effort that pursues
active participation of the private sector and local government units to
make poverty reduction rapid and sustainable,” Musali said. In 2012,
ARMM has recorded poverty incidence of 48.70 percentage points and Sulu
with a record high of 40.17 percentage points among families.
ASAPP
was created by the Human Development and Poverty Reduction Cluster,
which prioritizes 10 provinces in the country, including Sulu. Programs
to be financed under the initiative are the Universal Health Care,
Conditional Cash Transfer, Sustainable Livelihood, Abot Alam Program,
and other initiatives geared at informal-settler families.
Official
data showed that poverty incidence in the Philippines during the first
semester of 2013 decreased by three percentage points from its level in
2012, it rose again in 2014 by 1.2 percentage points, as food prices
increased faster than the incomes of the poor.
“The
challenge is to ensure that economic growth will increase the incomes of
the poor at a rate faster than inflation,” Musali added. She said
strengthening price control, providing production support facilities and
markets, and livelihood opportunities to poor population and improving
peace and order situation will address the threats to food price
inflation.
Twenty ARMM line agencies including its lead
convenor, the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources-ARMM, will
streamline their programs in the implementation of ASAPP for poverty
reduction, employment and income generation. (Bureau of Public
Information/APB/PIA-10)
No comments