Human Development Index

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite of development outcomes- life expectancy, functional literacy and per capita income; and is a general measure of province’s poverty situation.  Using the HDI as gauge,  Lanao del Norte’s belongs to the poorest provinces with an index of 0.470 in 1997 and 0.512 in 2000. All provinces in the region were classified as having medium human development. However, no province in the region had HDI higher than the country.  This implies that the provinces in Visayas and Luzon have higher HDI compared to the provinces in Mindanao.

Table 1.   Human Development Index Region X, by Province, 1997 and  2000

Source:  NSO

The province improved in all three (3) indicators of HDI- health as measured by life expectancy, education as measured by the combined elementary and secondary enrolment rate and functional literacy rate and income as measured by real per capita income.  However, all these HDI indicators are lower than the national level.

On life expectancy, the province experienced a mere 2% increase in the average level of years its people is expected to live from the time of their birth from 64.10 years in 1997 to 65.39 years in 2000.

In 2000, combined elementary and secondary enrolment rate increased by 5.9% from the previous level and with functional literacy remained rate in the same level, the province index on education increased by 1.9%.

Among these indicators, the province performed better on the average per capita income.  Real per capita income of the province in 2000 is 12.3% higher than the 1997 figure.

Table 2.  Human Development Index , 1997 and 2000

Source: NSO

Poverty Incidence

Lanao del Norte’s annual per capita poverty threshold in 2006 is P15,225.00.   This indicates that an average family with five (5) members would need P76,125.00 to be able to buy their  food and other basic needs.

Poverty incidence among families in Lanao del Norte shows a slight decline of 2.4 percentage points from 46.5% in 2003 to 44.1 in 2006. This is in contrast to the other provinces in Region 10 and the national level as well, where poverty incidences increased.  Although Lanao del Norte is a gainer, a far second to Bukidnon, its poverty incidence is higher than that of the regional average.

Among the provinces in  Region 10 only Lanao del Norte and Bukidnon recorded a decrease in the magnitude of poor families from 2003 to 2006. However, the increases in the magnitude of poor families in the other provinces brought a substantial increase in the number of poor families regionwide.

Table 3.      Poverty Incidence and Magnitude of Poor Families, Region X, by Province, 2003 & 2006

Source: NSCB

Lanao del Norte’s annual per capita food threshold in 2006 is P10,196.00.   This indicates that an average family with five (5) members would need P50,980.00 to be able to buy their basic food needs.

Subsistence incidence among families show an improvement from 26.1% to 24.1%. It can be noted that Lanao del Norte has the second highest subsistence incidence among the provinces in the region, next to Misamis Oriental.  Moreover, the provincial subsistence incidence is substantially higher than that of the regional (19.2%) and national (11%) figures.

In terms of magnitude of subsistence poor families, there has been a reduction of 1,477 families, from 41,020 in 2003 to 39,543 in 2006.  It is worthy to note that only Bukidnon and Lanao del Norte, among the provinces in the region, experienced a reduction in the number of subsistence poor families.

Table 4. Subsistence Incidence and Magnitude of Subsistence Poor Families, Region X, by Province, 2003 & 2006

Source:  NSCB

Municipal Poverty Incidence

Except for Linamon, all the municipalities of Lanao del Norte have poverty incidences higher than 50%.  This is based on the methodology developed by NSCB to generate municipal poverty incidence.  The methodology used the 2000 Family Income and Expenditure Survey and pegged a poverty line of $2 per capita per day.  The result also showed that four municipalities, namely Tagoloan, Magsaysay, Tangkal and Salvador have poverty indicence higher than 70%.

Table 5.   Poverty Incidence by Municipality, 2000

Poverty Diagnosis

The poverty diagnosis workshop was conducted by the province in 2006 to get indications on who are the poor, why are they poor, how many are they and where are they.  The result was documented in the Provincial Poverty Reduction Plan and is summarized in Table 3.168.

Table 6. Identifying the Poor: Who are they, how many are they and where are they? ^a/

^a/ Result of a poverty diagnosis workshop conducted for the Provincial Poverty Reduction Plan, 2006-2010

^b/ Ballpark percentages against the total number of poor families estimated at 73,114

^c/ Limited to general description subject to validation using the CBMS result