The Richest and the poorest barangays in the Philippines

Manila Times reported in December, 2013 that of the 42,028 barangays in the Philippines, the one that can be considered the richest is Barangay Bel Air in Makati City and the poorest is Barangay Pange in Zamboanga Del Norte.

What does it mean to be a rich and a poor barangay?

Income of course is the main basis.    

There are many ways with which a barangay earns.  Among its sources of income are the Internal Revenue Allotment or IRA from the national government and the rest from local real property taxes and fees.  A barangay may also receive grants and donations.

In most instances a barangay rely on IRA as source of revenue to cover its administrative expenses which is more than half usually.  Whatever is left is channeled to projects.

According to Locadio Trovela, Director of the National Barangay Operations Center of the Department of the Interior and Local Government, out of the more than 42,000 barangays in the country, only 1.8% or 754 may be considered “rich”.

By rich it means that the IRA they received ranged from P5 million to P40 million each.  Six of these barangays received P40 million or more.  The rest received between P1 million to P5 million.

Barangay Bel Air, Makati  Photo: blog.propertymarket.ph

Although Barangay Bel Air is considered the richest because of the income it received from real property and business taxes (which is huge because the headquarters of some of the country’s biggest corporations are located in Barangay Bel Air) its IRA is small compared to other barangays such as Barangay 176 in Caloocan City which received the highest, a whopping P90 million.

Why is this so?

The basis of allocating IRA shares are basically land area and population.  There are barangays who have land areas almost as big or larger than a Metro Manila city but has very few inhabitants so they just received a small allocation.  Barangay 176 in Caloocan City for example has a land area of more than 500 hectares, the nearest to San Juan City's 700 plus hectares, but it has hundreds of thousands of residents so it gets the biggest share of the pie.

Just how wealthy is barangay Bel Air?  

In 2012, the barangay’s income from fees, taxes and its share from the internal revenue allocation totaled P155.7 million based on DILG figures.  This is huge that there cities in the country whose income are no match to the income of Bel Air.   

How about the poorest barangay?

According to the same Manila Times report I cited earlier, if Bel-Air is the richest barangay, Barangay Pange in Saiyan, Zamboanga del Norte is the poorest.                                                                

Located near the boundary of Zamboanga del Norte and Zamboanga del Sur, Barangay Pange is one of the 16 barangays created when the town of Saiyan in Zamboanga del Norte became a municipality in 1967. 

About 38 kilometers from the town proper, Pange has no electricity, no potable water system, and no health and daycare centers.  It is situated in one of the most rugged terrains in the Zamboanga peninsula, too remote and almost inaccessible to public transportation.  

About 99 percent of its 1,100 residents are Subanen, a local ethnic group that only communicate through their own dialect.                                                           

Pange has an annual budget of less than P1 million and is likely to be vulnerable to anti-government insurgency, says the report.                                     

A Former Governor While Talking to a Barefoot Boy

Expecting nothing when I googled ‘barangay pange”,  I was pleasantly surprised to find  something written about it in the provincial website by a certain Don Guerra, a cultural worker.   Due to the poverty in the area, he reported that the residents only eat two times a day, and they have been used to it for a long time.  People are hopeful though that Pange’s poverty situation will be eased. The Barangay Chairman stressed the need for roads up to the poblacion.  He also added the importance of a health center in their barangay.

What caught my curiosity in the photo ops is the picture of the barefoot boy being given a pair of slippers by a former governor which looked like a once in lifetime event in the barangay.

How many such barangays do we have in the Philippines, so poor that when a politician visits and distributes slippers, it’s big deal?

A good friend, former Dean of U.P. College of Forestry and one of the country’s highly respected scientists both here and abroad, told me about a project he is working on when I visited him in Los Banos the other day.  He is in the midst of a breakthrough project in Mindanao and it’s about to take off in just a few months. This project is being implemented in a barangay there where the residents are probably as poor as those in Barangay Pange.  But because it promises great economic potential, those people in the barangay he is working with stand to benefit tremendously from the lucrative income to be derived from it.  It is expected to change their lives forever.

Talk of economic empowerment?  Maybe there are thousands of other barangays out there waiting for something like this to happen.  The leaders and residents just need to put their heads together to find out what is best for them. 

Afterthought: One sunny afternoon, way back in the Fifties when I was just about 5 years old,  and when Makati was not yet rich then as it is today, I watched with awe and admiration an uncle operating his tractor/bulldozer on a wide field dotted here and there with acacia trees.  Remembering that scene, I now realize that the very place where I stood while watching him was almost the spot where the awesome Yuchengco Tower at the corner of Ayala and Gil Puyat Avenues now stands (The Building on the leftmost side of photo).  That area happens to be a part of Barangay Bel Air today.