FROM THE MARGINS
After a long hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic, schools welcomed back students last week. It was a bittersweet event, juxtaposed with news that, taken together, paint a rather dismal picture: classroom shortages; parents worrying about the costs of in-person classes; the Philippines scoring the highest learning poverty rate in Asia; stampedes as thousands stormed DSWD offices nationwide to avail of educational cash aid.
The economic downturn caused by the pandemic has pushed 18.1 percent of our population to live below the poverty line. Against this backdrop is a dim scenario for the ordinary Filipino: inflation accelerated to 6.4 percent in July from a three-year high of 6.1 percent in June. Our GDP growth slowed down at 7.4 percent in the second quarter as inflation hit us where it hurts the most: consumer spending. While unemployment rate remained at six percent in June, the number of jobless Filipinos increased to 2.99 million. More people joined the labor force, including those above 65 years old who had to look for jobs amid rising prices.
Mary Jane Pascua, a mother of three, knew how difficult life is when one comes from a poor family. Like many Filipinos, she believes that education is the best way to secure her children’s future. She wants all her children to finish college, so that they could have a better life.
Education and poverty
Poverty and education are inextricably linked. Not every person without an education lives in extreme poverty, but most adults living in poverty missed out on a basic education. Poor people stop going to school because they have to work, which leaves them without the literacy and numeracy skills needed to improve their situation. With little income and few options, their children are also more likely to leave school, perpetuating a cycle of poverty that spans generations. This is unfortunate, because the most important way that education affects poverty is that it can help to end it.
Education directly correlates with many solutions to poverty: economic growth, reduced income inequality, reduced infant and maternal deaths, reduced stunting, reduced vulnerability to HIV and AIDS, reduced violence at home and in society. For this reason, the fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of the UN 2030 Agenda relates to education: “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.”
According to UNESCO, if all students in low-income countries had just basic reading skills, an estimated 171 million people could escape extreme poverty. If all adults completed secondary education, we could cut the global poverty rate by more than half.
Promoting access through microfinance
About 19.99 million Filipinos live below the poverty threshold. Meanwhile, the subsistence incidence or the proportion of those whose income is not enough to meet even just the basic food needs, was at 3.9 percent, equivalent to 1.04 million poor families. Not surprisingly, many poor Filipinos lack access to education, even with the welcome news that the Department of Education has surpassed its target of 28.6 million enrolled learners this school year.
The latest PSA figure on out-of-school youth (OSY) places them at 3.53 million in 2017. About 50 percent of OSYs belong to families whose incomes fall within the bottom 30 percent of the population. Financial concerns, or the high cost of education, was among the most common reasons given for not attending school.
I had been a microfinance practitioner for decades and have seen first-hand the truth of PSA’s findings: financial instability creates barriers to education and prevents children from attending school. These barriers include the costs of transportation, schoolbooks, and uniforms, as well as lost hours of child labor to support the family.
Poverty enticed Mary Jane to microfinance. In 2012, she joined a microfinance organization and took a loan to start a sari-sari store, which helped meet their daily needs. To support her children’s schooling, she also took out educational loans.
“My son became an electrical engineer with the help of microfinance,” she proudly says. It also supported her succeeding businesses: a tiklis manufacturing enterprise and the selling of LPG in their area. She says their lives improved because of these ventures, which now support the education of her two other children.
She appreciates the loans, savings and insurance that she can access through microfinance. “Even after all of my children complete their schooling, I will not leave this organization,” she professed.
As in Mary Jane’s case, microfinance enables poor families to afford schooling by providing income stability. Although few studies have analyzed the effect of microfinance on access to education, reports from the Philippines and Bangladesh support positive associations. Research from Uganda also suggests that participation in microfinance programs correlates with increased investment in children’s education.
Increased access to education can contribute to reducing poverty. The role of microfinance in promoting access to education is but a drop in the bucket. From my humble corner, I enjoin the government, the private sector and development partners to put more resources into this. As former US President Barack Obama once said: “The best anti-poverty program is a world-class education.”
(Dr. Jaime Aristotle B. Alip is a poverty eradication advocate. He is the founder of the Center for Agriculture and Rural Development Mutually-Reinforcing Institutions (CARD MRI), a group of 23 organizations that provide social development services to eight million economically-disadvantaged Filipinos and insure more than 27 million nationwide.)