October is National Statistics Month.  In coordination with the National Statistics Office, the Department of Social Welfare and Development Field Office 3, hosted the celebration of the National Statistics Month held on 3 October at Heroes Hall of the City of San Fernando, Pampanga.  With the theme “Quality Social Protection Statistics for Focused Targeting”, the National Housing Targeting System for Poverty Alleviation (NHTS-PR) was launched simultaneous with the other regions nationwide.

DSWD-FO 3 Regional Director Adelina S. Apostol noted that the activity aims to share the data base with our partner stakeholders engaged in providing social welfare protection programs for the poor and for them to utilize this data base in the identification of target poor household beneficiaries for their poverty alleviation programs.  This is also to ensure that the exclusion rate of poor households will be minimized and be given priority action for inclusion in any poverty alleviation undertakings of all social welfare and protection agencies in the region.

The NHTS data showed that of the 10,840,452 households assessed 5,525,118 (48%) households were identified poor. In region 3, there are 322,622 (45.29%) households identified poor out of the 712,255 households assessed.  Among the provinces in the region, Nueva Ecija has the highest percentage of identified poor households at 50.01% and the lowest in Bataan at 40.51%. Percent of poor households identified in the other 5 provinces are as follows:  Aurora with 49.37%, Zambales with 48.71%, Bulacan with 45.58%, Pampanga with 41.55% and Tarlac with 40.85 %.

Aside from identifying poor households, the data could also be used as a planning tool that could provide household level data into subsets of up to three correlated variables such as health, education and employment depending on the need.  The NHTS enables NGAs, NGOs, and LGUs to identify beneficiaries of their programs using objective and standardized parameters.