Palawan tops regional list of poor cultural minorities

CALAPAN CITY, Oriental Mindoro – The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) announced yesterday that Palawan province has the most number of poor indigenous peoples (IPs) among the five provinces in MIMAROPA (Oriental Mindoro, Occidental Mindoro, Marinduque, Romblon, Palawan).

In its report, DSWD-MIMAROPA said Palawan has 38,463 households of IPs followed by Oriental Mindoro with 10,323 households, then Occidental Mindoro with 7,876, Romblon, 1,862 and four in Marinduque.

DSWD’s Listahanan database shows that there are 58,528 identified poor households or 317,924 individuals or IPs in the region which comprises 28.2 percent of the total poor households.

Listahanan, a government mechanism to identify the real poor in the communities, shows that there are 5,664 IP households living in rural barangays while 52,864 households are living in urban barangays.Listahanan assessment and validation was conducted from March to December, 2015 which identifies 207,863 poor from the 569,316 total households assessed.

Listahanan database reveals that Palaw’an tribe tops the list of poor IPs with 13,390 households followed by the Cuyunon tribe with 10,152 poor households.

There are 5,196 IP solo parents regionwide, 1,752 are male while 3,444 are female. Also, 2,879 are identified pregnant women during the conduct of listing.

For the IP marital status, 200,767 individuals are single, 110,630 individuals are married, 4,891 individuals are widowed and 1,204 are separated from their partners.

In terms of educational attainment, 107,444 (34 percent) IP individuals aged 3-year old and above are attending school while 210,480 (66 percent) IP individuals are not.

Moreover, records show that there are 948 IP college graduates; 18,140 individuals are high school graduates; 35,279 individuals are elementary graduates and 91,532 individuals aged 3-year-old above have not completed in any grade level.