Bottom-up budgeting (BUB) is an adaptation of the participatory budgeting model in identifying and providing solutions to poverty at the municipal/city level. Leaders of civil society organizations engage with LGU officials in formulating a poverty alleviation plan to be considered in preparing...

This paper is a narrative account and assessment of the grassroots participatory budgeting (GPB) process in three municipalities of the Negros Province, namely, Sagay City, Hinigaran, and Cauayan. The GPB process was implemented with the objective of empowering civil society organizations (CSOs)...

The Aquino administration through the Human Development and Poverty Reduction Cluster (HDPRC) and Good Governance and Anti-Corruption Cluster (GGACC) launched the bottom-up budgeting (BUB) exercise in 2012. The strategy hopes to empower civil society organizations (CSOs) and citizens` groups to...

Credit provision for small and poor households has always been the major element of nongovernment organizations in alleviating poverty. Recently, there has been a move to replicate the Bangladesh Grameen Bank in the Philippines known as Landless People’s Development Fund. This paper assesses...

While food security policies have been too frequently formulated, this article argues that the measurement of its incidence has not been on a regular basis. This study describes a number of concepts useful in poverty analysis and explains the great inertia or even positive resistance against new...

Existing official poverty statistics cannot be directly utilized for cross-country comparison. This paper illustrates why. It presents an assessment of poverty measurement in the Philippines and Indonesia by examining methodologies used and the disparity in their respective poverty statistics. A...

Despite the government’s credit program approach, access of poor households to microfinancial services has remained limited. This paper explains the microfinance policy environment in the Philippines and evaluates the institutional and financial capacity/performance constraints of MFIs. This...

Usual indicators of intertemporal rural performance are technically flawed mainly because of the “shifting” of the physical area of the rural sector as population grows and/or economic activity expands. This problem is illustrated here using Philippine recovery data. Also shown is the fact...

Recent Philippine data indicate that the needs of the poor, which are met unsatisfactorily, include productive employment, access to quality education, access to basic health services, potable water, sanitation facilities and electricity. This paper emphasizes that eradicating poverty entails...

Poverty incidence has been declining in the Philippines over the past 10 years. However, with the advent of the Asian crisis in 1997, there was a reversal in poverty trends. Estimates indicate that the headcount index has gone up to 40 percent in 1998 from 31.8 percent in 1997. Other...