Baguio City is the only purely urban locale in the Cordillera. Though quite prosperous due in part perhaps to its urban setting, some poverty do lurk in the area. The City Government of Baguio, through the City social welfare office and the City planning office, sought to address such poverty by embarking on a poverty reduction action plan. However, said plan needs baseline information on the poverty situation of the City. The poverty mapping effort of the National Statistical Coordination Board provided exactly just that – a baseline poverty scenario.

Poverty mapping intends to locate the poor, to visually depict their relative condition and to help identify priority areas for appropriate program intervention at the local levels.

This mapping was based on the minimum basic needs (MBN) framework of identifying the poor. The MBN considers three major dimensions of poverty: Enabling, security and survival. Under the enabling dimension, the indicators considered were failure rate, drop-out rate and families with reported incidence of domestic violence. On security, the indicators considered were rates of crime against persons and crime against property. For the survival dimension, the indicators included were maternal mortality rate, child mortality rate, nutritional status of children 5 years old and below, households without access to safe water and households without sanitary toilets. This poverty mapping exercise established that the poorest barangays (excluding security dimension) in 2003 in Baguio City are:

There are 129 barangays in the City of Baguio considered in this mapping. In the different dimensions and indicators (except for drop-out rate and failure rate), the barangays were ranked based on the corresponding indexes and the worst (200 or higher) were considered for analysis. In some indicators, the barangays (best) lower in the ranking were considered for analysis. The change in performance of the barangays from 2001 to 2003 was also discussed for some indicators.

Upon study by the poverty mapping group in several of its technical sessions, the inclusion of security dimension in the over-all poverty somewhat distorts the poverty picture of the barangays. Hence, this report shows the over-all poverty sans the security dimension. However, the security dimension is treated separately in the analysis.

The reasons for the performance of these barangays are crucial for designing the poverty reduction action plan based on their experience on either improvement or deterioration. Henceforth, it is expected that the local poverty reduction action plan of Baguio City be anchored on the results of this exercise.