Hunger is decimating our demographic dividend

We often hear how much the country would profit from its demographic dividend: The Philippines has one of the youngest populations in the world, with the potential to energize the economy and backstop its growth.

The April 2023 labor force survey put the number of young people in the Philippines at 20.1 million, or 19 percent of our total population. But if their future is anything like that of most people in the labor force, they are likely to get stuck in entry level jobs or to remain as service and sales workers earning slightly higher than minimum wage throughout their working lives. As of April 2023, 28.7 percent of employed Filipinos are in elementary occupations, or mostly manual jobs, while 22.6 percent are service and sales workers.

Can we change the trajectory of our young people’s working lives?

Reforming our educational system so that it prepares the young for higher order jobs is high on everyone’s agenda and is one of the important discussion points in the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EdCom II). But we also need to care about how students start their academic journey — the condition of their physical and mental health as they start school—so that they grow, learn, and flourish as they progress from Kinder to Grade 12.

The 2019 Expanded National Nutrition Survey (2019 ENNS) reported that close to a third of all children under 5 years are stunted, a fifth are underweight, with about 6 percent of them additionally classified as suffering from acute undernutrition. This means that a good number of children are entering kindergarten while suffering from the negative effect of chronic hunger on cognitive development that, in turn, impacts learning and attention span in the classroom. While tragic and widespread, this is not irreversible.

Recent studies have shown that the brain can recover with good nutritional supplementation and the presence of a stimulating home and school environment. Unfortunately, we lack focused and effective programs to help children recover from early and chronic malnutrition. In fact, data show that the prevalence of being underweight among children 5 to 10 years old is even higher at 26 percent than the 19 percent recorded for the under 5, demonstrating the lack of interventions that could reverse this decline in our children’s health.

E-Net Philippines, a network of education reform advocates, together with its colleagues in the Alternative Budget Initiative, has consistently batted for an increase in the government’s budget for feeding programs. The 2023 Department of Education (DepEd) budget allocates P5.7 billion for a school-based feeding program, targeting 1.7 million Kinder to Grade 6 learners, based on the number of children assessed as wasted and stunted by DepEd in 2019. This is 13.2 percent of the 12.7 million school children who were assessed.

Given that the number of kinder and grade school children now totals about 16 million, the school-based feeding program is targeting less than the 2.1 million children who should be covered. A review of the assessment parameters is also indicated, since the 2019 ENNS reports a higher prevalence of children who are stunted (24.9 percent) and underweight (25.5 percent) than those assessed by DepEd.

The Department of Social Welfare and Development has a similar budget of P5.2 billion for a supplementary feeding program targeting 2 to 5-year-olds, or about 1.7 million children. Against this number, however, is the additional one million children seen as stunted due to chronic or recurrent undernutrition based on other data. As one study reveals, although there are daycare centers in almost all barangays, center-based childcare services only reach about 20 percent of the target population. This highlights the inadequacy of the current policy of limiting the delivery of needed nutritional supplementation to children enrolled in such centers.

Eliminating child hunger is an education issue, perhaps even more than it is a health care, welfare, or food security issue. We need healthy bodies to house bright minds. If we are to profit from the demographic dividend, we must set this goal before us and direct our energies toward addressing the problem. We need to organize both government and nongovernment actors to purposely and collaboratively act to resolve it. We start by ensuring that children grow up healthy, with sufficient food and a healthy environment so that their brain and emotional development are not impaired. We need to address the nutritional deficits rife among our adult population too, so that they are able to properly care for and guide their children to become the best they can be.

Nothing else is as fundamental for an economy and a society that thrives on and is supportive of the administration’s eight-point socioeconomic agenda.

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Maria Olivia Lucas is the president of E-Net Philippines, which represents civil society organizations in the EdCom II Advisory Council.