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.    

How computer-literate are our barangays today?

Visiting Valenzuela City’s website the other day, I came across an almost one year old report about a training wokshop on information technology conducted by Google and DILG for the city’s 33 barangays.

  

According to the report, “armed with their personal laptops”, representatives from its various barangays attended the workshop “to test the application of the operation system” behind Google’s Cloud computing system.

 The site explained “Google Cloud is an online platform consisting of network sharing and actual processing of data within the integrated connections of computers through internet. Aside from this, data can also be stored…once information is uploaded within the system, everyone can access them online.”

It added “the framework allows barangays to upload and view files, thereby decreasing the usage of records on papers.  This is the first step towards having a paperless office. Some documents, when allowed by the user, can also be viewed and accessed by the public, like the financial statement”.

“The project aims to promote transparency,” Local Government Operations Officer Alice Evangelista said.

There is no doubt that many barangays in the country, particularly those in urban centers like Valenzuela City, have migrated from the ancient system of processing their documentary requirements with typewriters to the more faster and accurate table top and lap top computers.

However, there is still a long way to go before the majority of barangays can catch up with the rest of other sectors such as large government agencies and commercial establishments in making computers the standard office tools in processing and storing their documents. 

Times have changed, and it’s quite disappointing to see many of our barangays still in the “dark ages” when it comes to catching up with modern technology – to think that billions of pesos are allocated to them every year in the form of the Internal Revenue Allotment.

 They have to catch up.  Otherwise we their constituents - the main reason why they exist - will be the ones to be groping in the dark.

Watch for the results of our studies on the state of computerization of barangays in many parts of the country. BR

 

Barangay chairs train as 'information partners'

The barangay chairs of the 54 barangays of Tanauan, Leyte underwent a Citizens Journalism Seminar Workshop to enable them to “communicate the important happenings in their respective areas especially in times of disasters and emergencies”.

Sponsored by the government’s Philippine Information Agency or PIA in Region 8 in partnership with the Local Government of Tanauan and headed by Mayor Pelagio Tecson, the workshop was scheduled last  February 21 from 8:00 o’clock in the morning to 4:00 o’clock in the afternoon at the Conference Hall of the Sangguniang Bayan.

PIA says “this is in line with its thrust of strengthening the Community Development Information Officers by including the barangays.

The participants were taught on what to report, how to make news and send them as SMS, how to send photos and video clips.

After completing the training, the participants are to be designated by the PIA as the Barangay Community Development Information Officer in their respective barangay.

According to the PIA Director of Region 8 Olive P. Tiu, ‘the importance of communication and information has never been more apparent than after the Yolanda”.

A focus group discussion conducted by PIA and UN OCHA two weeks after the ‘Yolanda’ disaster “revealed that access to information was the number one need of those people in the evacuation centers”.

Director Tiu commended the local government unit of Tanauan for being the first town in Eastern Visayas to have 100% participation among its 54 barangays.

After this worksop, the PIA in Eastern Visayas is planning to train all the other barangays in the region in citizen journalism.

This joint effort of two of the government’s agencies in the area is commendable.  However, the question that comes to mind is, why only now? 

The flow of communication is important in any government operation especially at the barangay level and the local government should have already a system in place a long time ago.

Why wait for a cataclysmic event such as the ‘Yolanda’ to happen before they’ll think of having such a system in operation.

Anyway, this initiative should also be cascaded down to the level of citizens where it is needed most not only in times of disasters but in their daily lives.  It would serve barangay officials well if they can also put into operation a network of citizens journalists below them who will report to the goings-on in the barangay.

In many instances, barangay leaders are the last ones to know.  There should be a citizen-initiated system of reporting and monitoring what's going on in the barangay and the official responsible must be on top of this.

This is also an effective way of preventing crime in their jurisdictions because those who violate the law or the presence of suspicious looking people in a community are immediately reported.
 

Care must be taken though in keeping the identities of those who make the reports secret for their own safety and security. BR

 

P100,000 retirement pay for barangay officials?

A representative from Negros Oriental, Rep. Mercedes K. Alvares of the National People’s Coalition, recently filed House Bill 3763 granting P100,000 retirement pay for barangay officials.

In filing the bill, Alvarez stressed that “the provision of additional benefit would serve as a recognition of the vital contribution to the realm of public service that are being extended by both elected and appointed barangay officials”.

“The officials and employees of the barangays are the frontliners in public service and are also the first responders to any situation in their respective barangays,” Alvarez said.

Barangay officials currently get honoraria or allowances for their services.

HB 3763 is among the many bills filed by lawmakers in connection with their desire to raise the earnings of barangay officials.

The proposed measure provides that all barangay officials shall be entitled to a lump sum retirement pay equivalent to a one-year honorarium but in no case shall exceed P100,000 to be taken from the barangay retirement fund.

For a barangay employee or official to receive such benefit, he or she must be at least 60 years old with minimum of nine years of service at the time of retirement.

Under the bill, the term retiree includes barangay officials such as barangay tanods, members of the Lupon Tagapamayapa, barangay health workers and barangay day care workers.

HB 3763 also calls for the creation of the Barangay Retirement Fund (BRF), which shall be used to fund the retirement of barangay officials mentioned in this Act.

The amount equivalent to one percent of the share of the national government under Section 284 of the Local Government Code of 1991, as amended, shall be used for this purpose.

Alvarez said that it should be the responsibility of the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) to administer and ensure the appropriate disbursement of the fund.

The filing of this bill is a step in the right direction.  Considering the thousand-and-one concerns a barangay official  have to face daily including risks to his life, he needs to be well-compensated and his financial needs taken care of.

The issue of pay could be one of the reasons why many barangays could not attract better educated and professional individuals to join the barangay workforce.

If we are to base our assumption on a recent Comelec report by Commissioner Grace Padaca, most of our barangays are led by people with very low educational attainments.  The report revealed that only 30% of barangay chairmen finished high school and 10% elementary.  

Are these numbers telling us that we are being led, at an important level of government, by people with low education, or to put it more bluntly, by illiterates?

There are exceptions of course, but it appears that they are in the minority.

Maybe this is the reason why some, and if not most, of those highly educated people in the  middle and upper economic classes have low respect for barangay officials.

This should not be the case.  It has to change. BR