The Foundation has helped more than three hundred thousand (300,000) Filipino children including the children of poor parents who have been beneficiaries of scholarship and educational support. We have also provided employment to the poor, and have extended assistance to the street children, physically disabled and abandoned persons.

POVERTY IN THE PHILIPPINES

About half of the Philippines' 88 million people live in rural areas. Poverty is most severe and most widespread in these areas and almost 80% of the country's poor people live there. Agriculture is the primary and often only source of income for rural families, most of whom depend on subsistence farming and fishing for their livelihoods.  In general, illiteracy, unemployment and the incidence of poverty are higher among indigenous peoples and people living in the upland areas. Overall, more than 1/3 of the people in the Philippines live in poverty.

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The poorest of the poor are the indigenous people, women, destitute elderly, street children, small scale farmers who cultivate land received through agrarian reform, landless workers, fishers and people in upland areas. There are substantial differences in the level of poverty between the regions and provinces and the poverty gap between urban and rural areas is widening.  Indigenous people living in highly fragile and vulnerable ecosystems, people in the uplands of the Cordillera highlands and on Mindanao Islands are among the poorest in the country.

The causes of poverty in rural areas in the Philippines vary widely from island to island.  This is partly because poor people have little access to productive assets and business opportunities. Indigenous people have high illiteracy rates and are affected by the encroachment of modern technology and cultures onto traditional norms and practices. Children growing up in the poorest urban areas in the Philippines are increasingly worse off than those in rural regions and face greater risks from natural disasters, HIV and exploitation.  

Hundreds of thousands of impoverished urban children in the Philippines are growing up in squalor, deprived of education and healthcare. Many of these children living in the poorest urban areas live in unsafe and insecure houses and lack access to schooling, water and sanitation and urban poverty can trap children in a downward spiral poverty of squalor, leading to sickness, neglect and risk of exploitation.

In Metro Manila, the most populated area with more than 11.5 million people, an estimated 1.7 million children or more are living in slums.  Fifty four percent (54%) of people living in these informal settlements have no access to water and fifty one percent (51%) have no access to toilets, worse than any other urban or rural areas. 

Children born in urban areas in the Philippines have slightly better chances of surviving than those in rural areas.  Poor urban children are less likely to be breastfed than those in rural areas (83% versus 92%, increasing the risk of malnutrition. While rural and urban poverty can both be detrimental to children, those in urban areas face specific risks like HIV, lack of access to education, threat of natural disasters and risk of violence, child trafficking and child exploitation.