Like other Third World countries, the Philippines is off track in more than 40% of the 21 indicators, including poverty, hunger, infant mortality, and maternal health. Based on the monitoring of the
National Statistical Coordinating Board (NSCB), at the rate things are going, the Philippines is bound to fail in meeting the goals by 2015.

There are seeming improvements in many of the indicators for Goals 3, 4 and 8. For Goal 3, which seeks to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005 and to all levels of education no later than 2015, the Philippines has already met the target of leveling the ratio of girls to boys in primary, secondary and tertiary education and the ratio of literate males to females aged 15-24.
According to the NSCB, the government is also getting closer to eliminating disparity in the share of the sexes in wage employment. The catch is, the Philippines, in fact, has already achieved those even before the goals were set in 2000.

The government is also happy to report that it has made improvements implementing Goal 4 or reducing child mortality. It has gained success in curbing under-5 mortality rate from 80 deaths in 1,000 live births in 1990 to only 31 in 2006. It is also nearing the target of 19% in reducing infant deaths, improving from 57% in 1990 to 24.9% in 2008.

In achieving Goal 6 of curbing HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, the data vary. Contraceptive use particularly condom as a way to prevent contracting HIV/AIDS is far from achieving the target. Also,
death rates associated with tuberculosis even worsened from 31.3% in 1992 to 33% in 2003. However, death rates associated with malaria has decreased from 1.3% in 1992 to 0.3 in 2003.

However, as a whole, the chance of meeting the targets by 2015 is nil. For example in Goal 1, the
poverty incidence among the population at the national level decreased only slightly from 33% in 2000 to 32.9% in 2006. This figure is based on a very low national poverty threshold that reflects a change in methodology (i.e. removing items heavily consumed by low and middle-income families from the set of entitlements) at only PhP15,057 per head per year. But even this very negligible improvement masks the regional disparity and hides the worsening poverty in the regions. For example, in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and Region IV-B, 61.8% and 52.7% of the population respectively, are below the poverty line while in the National Capital Region the poverty incidence is 10.4 percent.

Widespread hunger in the Philippines is reflected in over 60% of Filipinos having difficulty buying food
and around 9.3 million households failing to meet the 100% dietary energy requirement. Three million
children aged 0-5 years are underweight while three million more children aged 6-10 years old are
malnourished.

The backwardness of the country’s education system is also reflective in the apparent failure of achieving the targets in Goal 2. Of the four indicators under the target of full primary schooling for all children of appropriate age, the country is still far from achieving the indicators. It has made improvements in the cohort survival rate, from 69.7% in 1990 to 75.3% in2007. Primary completion rate also increased from 64.2% in 1990 to 73.1% in 2007, but this is still far from the target.

Goal 5 speaks of improving maternal health but the maternal mortality remains high while the proportion of births attended by skilled health personnel remains low. For example in 2006, there were 162 mothers who died out of 100,000 live births while only 72.9% of mothers giving birth in 2007 were given attention by skilled health personnel.

The NSCB preferred to withhold giving an evaluation of the achievements in Goal 7 or ensuring
environmental sustainability. A very important indicator of this goal is the forest cover of the country as a proportion of its land area. The Forest Management Bureau even gave a suspicious figure on the said indicator which saw an immediate increase from 23.8% in 2003 to 52.8% in 2004. The FAO however reports that forest cover is only 22.94% of total land area which excludes plantation forests used for commercial purposes.

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The above is an extract from a forthcoming issue of IBON Foundation’s Facts and Figures Special Release on the
 Millennium Development Goals, written by Glenis Balangue.