The result of the second round of assessment conducted by the Department of Social Welfare and Development Bicol revealed that there are 369, 395 poor households in the Bicol region, as presented yesterday at the Hotel St. Ellis, Legazpi City on its Listahanan launching.

The second assessment covered all rural and urban areas in the 6 provinces, 107 municipalities, 7 cities and 3,471 barangays of the region

According to DSWD Regional Director Arnel Garcia, this year’s assessment result posted 34% of the total assessed of 1, 074,005.
It can be recalled that early last year, the DSWD’s information management system called Listahanan conducted house-to-house interviews to get the socio-economic information of the households. Information gathered is then subjected to the Proxy Means Test (PMT), a statistical tool that approximates household’s income using the proxy variables indicated in the Family Assessment Form used by the Listahanan field staff in conducting interviews.

2015 assessment result

The province of Camarines Sur posted the biggest share with 34% or 126, 476 identified poor households, followed by Masbate with 77,227 or 20 % and Albay with 69, 681 or 18.8 %, Sorsogon with 48,555 or 13%, Camarines Norte with 32,190 or 8.7% and Catanduanes with 15, 266 or 4.1

Most of these poor households are found in rural areas with 84.% or 310, 706 share while 16% or 58, 689 are in urban areas.

The total number of poor individuals regionwide is 2,340,468. Of this, 1,122,485 are women while 1,217,982 are men.

It can also be noted that children constitute a large percentage (55%) or 1,294,840 in the population of poor individuals.

There are about 87,928 individual senior citizens poor regionwide while 29,346 poor individuals have disability.

Furthermore 624,221 or 51% poor individuals reported to have no occupation while 215,932 or 17.7% are farmers, fisherfolks and foresters.

“Information available in the Listahanan database includes other information such as access to safe water and electricity, quality of housing materials, tenure status of the family’s house and lot and their specific occupation, etc.”, said Garcia.

Listahanan shares the available database to stakeholders at no cost. Information such as statistics and magnitude can be obtained through data request. However, the list of poor families with names and household members shall be shared only upon execution of a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) between DSWD and the data user.###