Zero poverty zones

BANTAY GOBYERNO
Ike Señeres

MANILA -- More than one hundred years after the birth of our Republic, we are still at the stage of trying to eradicate corruption. The new administration says that if there is no corruption, there is no poverty. This could be a chicken and egg situation, because it could also be said that if there is no poverty, there is no corruption.

Both problems taken into consideration, a developing country like ours should go beyond the goal of merely eradicating corruption and poverty. Ambitious as it may sound, our more objective goal should be to achieve economic supremacy and national prosperity, both being mutually reinforcing.

In my previous column I discussed the concept of eradicating poverty at the micro level, in specific self-contained communities where targeted poverty eradication programs could be manageable, compared to bigger macro levels that are more difficult to achieve. At the core of the concept is the idea that if all of the households in a given community could have easier access to the imaginary basket of goods, it could be statistically documented and proven that poverty has indeed been effectively eradicated.

The communists have adopted the strategy of surrounding the cities from the countryside. An alternative to that approach is to eradicate poverty in small areas, until the poverty free zones will spread and eventually engulf the entire countryside and the cities too. Readers who are attuned to political theories will recognize this as an application of the principle of subsidiarity, and that is precisely what it is.

Following the criterion of being self-contained, it appears that ancestral domains and remote municipalities would be the best locations for piloting the subsidiarity principle. The reason for this is very simple. These places are more self-contained than the others, and presumably would be less prone to the influence of corruption coming from the outside.

In a meeting of the Corinthian Coffee Clutch (C3), my proposal to deploy volunteer consultants to selected local communities was already approved. Based on my experience in the Transfer of Knowledge thru Expatriate Nationals (TOKTEN) program, this deployment should follow the rule of deploying only to clients that are determined to be willing, able and ready (WAR). This is just an acronym, but indeed we are waging a war against corruption on one hand and against poverty on the other hand.

In my search for new technologies that could be used in remote locations, I came across the policy of the United States to enable more households to gain access to broadband connectivity. Over 200 million households already have broadband at home in the US , and they would like to add 100 million more households.

No data is available about broadband access at the household level in the Philippines , but it would probably be less than 50,000 households, the number recorded for the countries at the bottom of the list. Broadband access at home will eventually become an issue here in the Philippines , because of its potential in increasing household incomes, among other benefits.

Broadband connectivity is needed at the community level in order to deliver remote education and remote medicine, among other services. The good news is, it is within the reach of small communities to build their own broadband infrastructure, possibly as a service provided by their own local cooperatives.

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