But not exactly poor: 2 million live in slums

POVERTY in slum settlements cannot be simply overcome through traditional poverty reduction programs such as cash transfers.

The Philippine government should take regulatory actions that cut cross administrative boundaries, as environmental issues cannot be isolated by geographical and political boundaries, Dr. Marife Ballesteros argued in a book published this month by the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

ADB noted that while Southeast and East Asia regions have made major progress in reducing income poverty, living standards for many poor people remain a major challenge due to worsening environmental degradation and increasing vulnerability to climate change.

“Environments of the Poor” was the theme of a conference which the ADB and some 17 development partners organized on 24–26 November 2010 in New Delhi. The papers on Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific at this conference were revised and edited for this publication.

In her paper Slum Poverty in the Philippines: Can the Environment Agenda Drive Public Action?, Dr. Ballesteros described the demographics of Metro Manila which is home to about 2 million slum dwellers or about 16 percent of its population (11.5 million) in 2010.

Dr. Ballesteros writes: Households in slums are not necessarily income poor ... More than 50% live above the poverty line and can spend between US$2 and US$4 per day, but reside in poor environments. The slum-dwellers who live above the poverty line usually make minimum salaries or wages and work casually. They continue living in the slums because there is no alternative shelter in the city and “they cannot afford the cost of travelling from distant, less expensive, peri-urban regions for work and income earning opportunities in urban centers.”

She added that at the same time, not all the poor live in slums. Some are scattered around the city in areas with similar physical environments as the slums — a deficit of infrastructure and an insecurity of tenure.

The study was mainly based on interviews in four slum areas in Metro Manila, and enriched with some secondary statistics.

It also highlighted the following: environment of the slums and how it causes poverty; higher expenditure on basic services; higher health risk from urban environment and climate change; damage to social fabric and mental well-being; damage to lives and property of slum poor.

Dr. Ballesteros concludes: Unfortunately, these problems do not motivate the government to act since the government does not look at shelter deprivation as part of urban poverty caused by the environment. Shelter deprivation is mainly perceived as income poverty. Thus, government programs on shelter are mostly directed to improving affordability of individual households. Less attention is given to settlement planning and infrastructure development. The threat to settlements brought about by climate change are mainly translated into activities and strategies for disaster response rather than effective prevention.

The solution to slum poverty thus involves giving adequate attention to town planning to ensure appropriate land use planning and proper implementation of building codes and environmental laws. The provision of space for housing low-income families and the expansion of urban infrastructure to underserved, informal settlements should be an integral component of town planning.

News Report: http://www.malaya.com.ph/business-news/business/not-exactly-poor-2m-live-slums

Source: http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/pub/2014/environments-of-poor-southeast-asia.pdf

Photo by John Francis Lagman: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jlagman17/514430524

Government evicts 4,400 families from waterways

THE Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) has evicted some 4,400 families (22,000 persons) from major waterways in Metro Manila.

DILG Secretary Mar Roxas said this is part of the government's Integrated Flood Plan, which he presented during the Flood Summit held last month at the House of Representatives.

About 100,000 families live in danger zones, including some 60,000 along waterways.

Roxas said the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) will evict some 19,440 families (97,200 persons) in order to clean up eight major waterways.

The government's budget for the relocation is P50 billion. A financial assistance worth P18,000 will be distributed (P1,500 a month rental assistance) to each family who agrees to be evicted even if the relocation is not yet provided.

To keep the informal settlers (squatters) from leaving their distant relocation sites, the DILG has constructed few near-site or on-site medium rise buildings in Manila.

President Benigno Aquino III has instructed that the relocation efforts should not displace families from their sources of livelihood and schools.

Source: http://www.rappler.com/news/57635-dilg-moves-families-danger-zones

Related story by UPA: 59 families in Estero de San Miguel-Legarda move to Muzon, Bulacan

Slum dwellers face forced eviction; Road widening project to leave 1,600 homeless

Slum dwellers in five villages of Tondo district in Manila were evicted last Tuesday (April 22) to make way for a road-widening project by the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).

The P100 million Road 10 (R-10) project will add two more lanes to its 2-kilometer section adjacent to Manila's North Harbor area. It is expected to improve traffic flow in Metro Manila but it will also render some 1,600 people homeless.

Homelessness may yet again be the fate of 27-year-old Mary Jane Paco, who lives with her husband and one-year-old child.

Paco’s family used to lived on the sidewalk outside the Santo Niño de Tondo Parish Church. The shanty on Road 10 has provided them shelter for the last three years.

"We may yet again live on the streets, and maybe go back to our old refuge on the sidewalk outside the Tondo church after authorities flatten our home," she said.

Yolanda Gamido, 53, finds herself in the same predicament. She is a renter and is not qualified for relocation. The mother of two now lives alone, barely getting by on her pension.

Ammie Serafin, a former overseas worker said she has heavily invested in Road 10. She bought a land property, renting out the 15 rooms in her three-storey house. She also bought other properties in the area.

Judith Javar, a 35-year-old mother of four, was born and raised in the slums along Road 10. Last year her family was relocated to Bocaue, Bulacan, about 30 kilometers northeast of Manila. She said she returned to Tondo because there is no livelihood in the relocation site.

Javar prays for a better life now that she will be forced to return to the relocation site; otherwise she becomes homeless.

Sixty-one-year-old Merly Barredo, a long-time resident of R-10, will be relocated to Bocaue. The National Housing Authority (NHA) gave her a US$22 allowance and provided a truck to transport her personal belongings. Barredo works as a candy vendor in Tondo, earning $7-11 a day.

She came to Manila 30 years ago to seek a better life. She said the life she had on Road 10 was actually better than the rural life in her hometown in Aklan province.

"Being relocated to Bocaue is like returning to my life in the mountains," she said.

The demolition is expected to finish by the end of the month.

Some urban poor groups say it was illegal and they blame the privatization of Manila's port as the reason behind the demolition.

Source: http://www.ucanews.com/news/slum-dwellers-prepare-for-demolition-in-manila/70786

Calcutta, Dhaka and the Poor

Calcutta, Dhaka and the Poor

by Denis Murphy
Saturday, 02 May 2009

There have been huge changes in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) and Dhaka, though the symbols of poverty remain: the rickshaws, pavement people, forlorn beggars and vast stretches of slums.

In Dhaka I came upon an old woman and a baby squatting by the side of the path. The woman was bent over the baby and had it wrapped in her faded red sari. They looked inconsequential, the two of them, like a bag of old leaves you could pick up and walk off with easily. There was no tin cup for begging, and they weren't there the next day. I watched a line of rickshaw drivers pass by. In Dhaka the rickshaw is pulled by bicycle power. The drivers were all small, dark and looked as if they had just been condemned to death. They work on average 12 hours a day in traffic so chaotic it makes Manila's look genteel.

In Howrah, Calcutta's sister city, we met a group of outcaste people-scavengers, sweepers, garbage men-who live near a giant garbage dump. We talked about their eviction: the High Court had ordered the outcastes be removed because of the pollution caused by the dump. About a hundred men stood around us talking while clouds of flies landed on their hands and faces. No one moved to brush away the flies, even from the faces of the babies that some of the men held.

The danger for visitors in seeing such poverty is that we may believe we are dealing with people who are somehow less than human, who only think of food and have no hope in life, or pride in their culture and history. We may believe they are unable to work in organized ways to change their situation, and that they have no sense of justice and human dignity. I was lucky enough in Calcutta and Dhaka to have friends who allowed me to understand a little more about these poor men and women.

In Dhaka I was able to talk to six Bengali Muslim women working with an NGO called Shelter for the Poor. They were organizing the slumdwellers of Dhaka to get land tenure security for their families. According to the United Nations' Habitat such security of tenure or freedom from eviction is a necessary pre-condition for urban development. The women said other NGOs offered water, light and health programs which were good, but if there were evictions, they would lose all those good things. "Land, land," they said, "that's what we need."

All six had taken part in protests against evictions. In one protest rally 100,000 persons employed a Mahatma Gandhi-like method by sitting down in one of the main intersections of the city. The police beat the protesters. Two of the six women showed the welts left by the policemen's lathi canes across their shoulders and legs. This was several years after the event. The women were thoughtful, funny and seemed to enjoy one another. Heh, I said to myself, these are not the fatalistic stereotypes we imagine the Dhaka poor to be.

The outcastes of Howrah said they had already taken a petition to the High Court signed by 250 of their 400 families. They wanted the Court to explain why it ordered them removed and the garbage left untouched. They will not go to their Member of Parliament who they found cared nothing about them; but they will see the mayor and if they get no explanations, the leader said, "We will fight under the banner of our organization." I was told their organization was a national federation of outcaste people. "We will rally and send petitions and keep after the government till they talk to us."

"We have lived here 70 years," they said. "We have city water pipes and two schools and 200 - 300 of our children go to school. We want a space in this world. We need it more than the garbage dump does." Such is not the talk of fatalists.

I think if we were able to go deeper in our relationship we would appreciate how much they love their children, their Muslim beliefs and have hope in India and Bangladesh.

Traditional culture is very much alive. At an anniversary celebration in a rural village a 45-minute drive from Calcutta, poor women recited the 100-year-old poems of Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Both Calcutta and Dhaka are parts of historic Bengal. A seven-year old girl performed classic thousand-year-old Indian dances later in the program.

It would definitely help human solidarity in Manila if the well-off could come to know the poor a little better than they do. Ignorance of one another creates stereotypes that have little to do with reality, but set people against each other.

If we know the poor people of Tondo, Payatas or the esteros, we'll marvel at their determined efforts to raise their families. In crowded huts with leaky roofs, and the smell of the garbage pile never far away; with so little food each day that the children cry for more till the mother has to slap them to make them stop, with no place to escape from the noise and crowds and the demands and threats of the world, they keep at it day in, day out, working and nurturing, hoping their children will be better off than themselves. Looked at it this way, their lives are gallant. They believe deeply in God. The slums are abrim with love; they are special places of love, not the urban jungles some people talk about.


Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His e-mail address is upa@pldtdsl.net


http://www.thepoc.net/index.php/Parokya-Sa-Web/Tinig-ng-Maralita/Calcutta-Dhaka-and-the-Poor.html