In an undated slide presentation by João Pedro Azevedo of the World Bank Group, poverty was defined as “pronounced deprivation in well-being”. The definition takes the economic and social dimensions, i.e., the lack of decent shelter, insufficient food and poor health. There are various ways to measure poverty that take into account the type of materials used for the house, the amount and type of food taken in a day, the number of children that goes to school, etc. In terms of income, a Filipino family of five members earning less than P12,030 per month in 2021 was considered poor. The results of regular surveys (e.g., quarterly) of self-rated poverty by a sample population (e.g., 1200 respondents) are usually reported in mainstream media. The Social Weather Station survey results showed 14 million Filipino families that considered themselves poor in the first quarter of 2023.

The many causes of poverty may be categorized into political, social, economic and environmental. In a public report on 2022 March 01, World Vision cited the lack of basic services, education and employment opportunities as well as climate change as major causes of poverty. The lack of access to education clearly obstructs the path to prosperity – one of the conditions for well-being as defined in the Webster dictionary. Education provides the capacities for improving social and economic conditions of an individual and families through employment by self and others. Informed individuals, families and communities can rationally overcome government service inefficiencies and make them more resilient to the impact of climate change. They can stand courageously for their right to be served promptly and rightly by their government. Moreover, they can share their ideas in finding solutions to our environmental woes or participate in the collective action to at least reduce the effects of climate change, resulting from the senseless and cruel actions of our fellow thinking inhabitants of the Earth.

Without education, there can be poverty of the mind – the worst kind of poverty according to Philip Noel-Baker (In the book “What kind of world are we leaving our children?” published by UNESCO in 1978). The mind, interchangeably the brain, encompasses thinking, emotions or feelings and actions – the three learning domains technically known as the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains, respectively. Thus, if you stimulate the mind into thinking, feeling and actions by feeding it with the needed information, then you are improving the state of the mind. Growing the mind and thinking critically need factual and accurate information from the right sources. In this age of information explosion and deceptive trolls, it is imperative that we examine critically the information specially from the social media. Let us not be misled by information without any factual reference or evidence by smartly questioning it until we find proof of its truth.

The poverty of the mind is exacerbated by the poverty of the wallet, i.e., without money and income sources. Parents are unable to send their children to school because they are economically incapable. Their harsh economic situation forces children to work. A huge number of Filipino children work in the streets, factories, farm and elsewhere instead of going to school. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, there were 1.37M working children aged five to seventeen years old in 2021. The lack of education drives intergenerational poverty, i.e., poverty is passed on to the next generation. Children of the poor in physical resources, like money, also often suffer from malnutrition that retards mental and physical development and affects badly future learning capacity.

The solutions to poverty lie in analyzing the causes. The Asian Development Bank listed the causes of poverty in the Philippines (Poverty in the Philippines: Causes, Constraints and Opportunities, December 2009). One of the key findings was that “poverty levels are strongly linked to educational attainment”. The report recommended enhancing the government’s poverty reduction strategy involving key sectors for a collective and coordinated response in the immediate and short term. It urged the government to continue pursuing key economic reforms for sustained and inclusive growth in the long term. It might help the current government to revisit the report and assess what has been done, what worked and did not work, and what else need to be done. The goal now should be poverty eradication in line with the government’s expressed goal of making the Philippines a first-world country in 2040 following the growth path of South Korea in Asia.