(Continued from Feb. 20-21, 2021)
IT GOES without saying therefore that the households within an intelligent settlement should have either access to or ownership the six indicators, otherwise they could hardly be considered intelligent, so to speak.
Upon closer examination, however, it would appear that the last four criteria could possibly be provided for at the community level, instead of the household level. What that means is that Cooking Fuel, Electricity, Toilets and Safe Water could become communal utilities that could possibly become the money making or revenue generating businesses of village associations or local cooperatives.
For example, cooking fuel in the form of biogas could be pipelined into the homes, as an alternative to individual Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) tanks. As another example, electricity could be provided by associations or cooperatives acting as Independent Power Producers (IPP).
As we already know it, there are already existing cooperatives that are distributing water to the households, by way of tapping their own water sources or buying from the local water districts. If and when distributed water is already available from any stable source, it would already be practical to consider the installation of public toilets, as an alternative to individual toilets at each household.
Although some sectors would not welcome this idea, this could be a solution to the problem of providing more access to more households, considering the high costs of individualized toilets. Perhaps as an additional means of providing more accessibility, local villages or communities could look into community laundry facilities and community kitchens, since these two would also be logical extensions of distributed water.
Now that we know that the MPI already exists, we should now advocate it as an alternative approach to the “basket of goods” approach of measuring poverty. By comparison, the multidimensional approach is more indicative than the conventional approach, because it directly measures accessibility and not just affordability. Besides, the accessibility it measures is more specific, compared to the items in the imaginary basket that is not even fully declared what it consists of.
According to official figures that supposedly uses the conventional approach; the poverty rate in the Philippines is less than 30 percent. If and when we will use the multidimensional approach, it is possible that this figure could even be reversed.
One advantage of the multidimensional approach is that the local governments and the civil society would have the opportunity to directly intervene in poverty reduction, by way of programs and projects that would increase access to the six indicators. That would be great for society in general, because we would see active participatory democracy in action, with everyone doing their part in poverty reduction one way or the other.
On top of that, this will give online groups to become active in social networking sites to promote this advocacy./PN
