Voices: “We don’t earn enough to live in security”

This is part 1 of regular updates we will post about our participatory action-research done with families living in poverty, on housing, education and livelihood.

-The daily average income of an adult is 190Php. -If husband and wife both earn = 380Php/day average income for a family.
-22% of adults don’t earn or so irregularly that they can’t tell an average. 
-On the adults earning, 41% have more than one way of earning.

Based on NSO expenditure data, the lowest 30% of the population spend 59% of their earnings on food = the family spends 224Php out of 380Php in order to eat, independently of the number of children they have. Thus they still have 156Php to spend for other purposes.

Little exercise:
On what will the family spend on priority? Where will they live? How will the parents provide for the education of their children? What happens when health problems arise? What about leisure, culture?

The National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) in its “Report on the state of poverty in the country, as of first semester of 2012”, states that one family, in the NCR region, is not poor if they have more than 336Php per day.

So don't these families mentioned above live in poverty? Shouldn’t the amount from NSCB be reviewed upwards?

[Note: 54adults answered the survey. Including their spouses, 94 were questioned regarding their earnings (73 earn and 21 don’t earn)]