Speech
of
His Excellency Fidel V. Ramos
President of the Philippines
On the Department of Health’s Immunization Day and the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s Consultation on Child Welfare Services

[Delivered at the Heroes’ Hall, Malacañang, March 3, 1993]

The child cannot want

THIS MORNING we witness the celebration of three occasions—the launching of National Immunization Day; the awards to outstanding mother- and baby-friendly hospitals, as well as the awards to the winner of the iodine deficiency eradication campaign; and the launching of the global consultation on child-welfare services.

Let me add my personal as well as our Government’s official welcome, as the housekeeper in this hall, to Dr. James Grant, the executive director of the UNICEF, and other distinguished guests. Let me thank Dr. Grant for traveling this far to bestow these UNICEF awards on selected Philippine hospitals. I assure you, Dr. Grant, that we will not refuse any grant from you.

Mother- and child-friendly

I am told by Health Secretary Juan Flavier that 102 Philippine hospitals are receiving these awards, supposed to be the largest number in the world. Well, this should not be too surprising to all of us, because not just our hospitals but the whole country is mother- and child-friendly.

Let me commend Dr. Flavier for this organizational excitement—this masterstroke, so to speak, he is attempting—that of immunizing nine million Filipino children simultaneously and not just once but twice a year for the next three years. And certainly, Secretary Corazon de Leon of Social Welfare and Development also should be commended for her efforts in carrying out our programs for child welfare.

Health care is one of my Government’s most urgent concerns and this arises from our basic program of empowering the people.

The Filipino child is at the same time the most precious resource and its most vulnerable citizen.

While we are determined to do all we can, and a large part of our meager budget now goes to public welfare, especially health services, we also realize that we cannot ever hope to have enough, not until economic growth is much higher and more consistent than it is now.

The new tyranny

There are simply not enough hands, not enough resources, but we can go much farther than we have done so far if we make up our mind to use those scarce resources as efficiently and as wisely as we can.

If poverty is the new tyranny, then the oppression falls most heavily on the Filipino child. The deprivation in which so many of our young people exist is self-evident to anyone who has eyes to see in Metro Manila, as well as in the countryside.

The United Nations Development Program in its human development report for 1992 summarizes in cold statistics the extent of the Philippine problem.

The Philippine figures for 1990 are: Children dying before the age of five, 140,000; malnourished children under five, 3,100,000; children not in primary or secondary schools, half a million.

And furthermore, according to UNICEF, there are some 50,000 streetchildren in Metro Manila, of whom 20,000 are child prostitutes. I consider many of these figures not exaggerated but, indeed, conservative. And I am prepared to assume the situation is even worse than the figures indicate.

We are a country of the young—53 percent of all Filipinos are below 20 years old, 40 percent are under 14 years and 20 percent are below seven. That we are such a country is both a burden and a hope. A burden because a comparatively small number of adults must nurture so many young people. But they are a hope because of the explosion of social and economic energy that we can expect in the not-too-distant future, when this population bulge comes of age.

In macroeconomic terms, my Government has decided how to deal with deprivation in our national society. And this is to make an all-out direct attack on Philippine poverty.

How do we propose to do this? To start with, we are compelling all the agencies of Government to take a pro-poor bias. We insist that economic policy in the large must become sensitive to the well-being of the majority among us who are without the means to lead decent and useful lives.

To start with, we have realigned the budget to favor productivity and services in our poorest regions, provinces, cities and towns. And we have identified 19 out of our 78 provinces as among the poorest which deserve special National Government support.

‘Positive discrimination’

I am thankful that I see here many of our governors and mayors who are part of that program. And we shall continue to count on them for our massive program to alleviate poverty.

To a great extent, these communities are poor because they have had less access than the richer regions to basic Government services. We are therefore redressing this historical neglect with what I call “positive discrimination.”

We shall be allocating to these poor regions and provinces more than their usual share of elementary schools, hospitals and health clinics, farm-to-market roads, irrigation systems and other basic infrastructure or services.

We shall also see to it that they have increasing access to land, credit and technology.

And we shall be encouraging towns and barangays with large populations of the poor to intensify community action by promoting programs that Government and the private sector can support with funds and expertise.

Government shall also be setting itself not just theoretical but measurable standards for gauging its success in easing poverty year after year—in terms of fewer malnourished children and lower infant mortality; lower unemployment rates; rising local incomes; fewer index crimes; easier access to justice, and so forth.

We are concerned especially about children who are very vulnerable. These are children in the areas where insurgency is still present; children who are part of indigenous cultural communities; children who work to survive; children who are homeless; children who are exploited by adults; children who are displaced by natural calamities.

Equalizing opportunities for survival

Disparities between these children and children who have more in life must be bridged, and immunization and health care are some of the concrete actions to equalize opportunities for survival for all Filipino children. For in the end the value of what we seek to do for our country will be measured by our capacity to transform our concern and love for our children into affirmative action. This is one reason why we welcome so much the global consultation on child-welfare services taking place in the Philippines.

In support of the U.N. International Convention on the Rights of the Child, which we ratified in 1990, we drew up the Philippine Plan of Action for Children in 1992 so that we could, among others, chart our directions in the propagation of the basic rights of the child: the right to survival; the right to development; the right to protection; and the right to participation.

We must consider the pressures that industrialization, urbanization, technological change, new gender roles and changing values exert on the stability of the family. Of serious concern is the child whose biological parents cannot take care of him or her. The Government must step into this problem to provide an alternative or substitute parental care such as adoption or foster care.

My sister-in-law, Mrs. Ramos’s younger sister, Linda Martinez McCabe, was a member of the welcome house of Pennsylvania. And on her journeys to and from the Philippines to the U.S., she used to place temporarily in our home children she was escorting to the U.S. en route to their adoptive families. And so the First Lady and I know firsthand the kind of second chance that intercountry adoption can do for children without families of their own.

As for National Immunization Day, it is our way of saying that all Filipino children deserve our love, our concern and our urgent attention.

On these two days this year, on April 21 and on May 19, nine million children under five years old will be inoculated simultaneously—all on the same day, against the common diseases that kill them—polio, measles, tuberculosis, diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus.

National Immunization Days

I commit our Government’s full support to the Department of Health’s National Immunization Days and the Consultation on Child Welfare Services sponsored by the Department of Social Welfare and Development. And so I would like to announce to you that I have already signed—I will not sign it in your presence, because I’ll just issue you a xerox copy—this proclamation declaring April 21 and May 19 of this year and the third Wednesday of January and February for two years thereafter as National Immunization Days and designating the Department of Health as the lead agency to coordinate all Government efforts and private efforts for such days.

And so to provide support for this lead agency, I hereby direct the relevant Government line agencies—the Departments of Education, Culture and Sports, of Interior and Local Government, of National Defense, and of Social Welfare and Development—to support the Department of Health in this campaign and to devise a plan of action in collaboration with the private sector for immediate implementation, in preparation for National Immunization Days for all Filipino children.

In support of the global consultation on child-welfare services, I hereby direct our Presidential legislative liaison officer to submit immediately to me his recommendations on the viability of certifying the bill on intercountry adoption of Filipino children as a priority Administration bill.

The child cannot speak

And lastly, for the benefit of our Local Government officials, the governors, their vice-governors, the members of the provincial board, the mayors, their vice-mayors and the members of our municipal councils and all others at Local Government level who are participating in this twin launching, may I remind you once more that these programs are part of the Administration’s total vision to move forward as an economically-sound and morally-healthy nation. Under the Local Government Code your responsibility and role in protecting the Filipino child by helping eradicate children’s diseases are clearly defined.

I expect all of you to support all the related and supportive programs to our immunization and child-welfare programs. We have so much to do together—and I ask all of you to give all of your moral support and your wholehearted help for this program. The child cannot speak—he cannot act for himself. He has not lived long enough to vote—only long enough to starve and to be neglected.

The politician with his eye on re-election—and the big-time official with plenty of important plans on his minds—may not hear the child’s weak and tiny cries. Small children need big friends to speak up for them. According to the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, “The child cannot wait. His name is Today.”

Your job and mine—our work together—is to make sure that there is a tomorrow—a happier tomorrow for all of our country’s children. By empowering them, we empower ourselves, the Filipino people.