Senator Sonny Angara has proposed establishing Resource Centers for Indigenous Peoples (IPs) to bring social services closer to them.
Angara has introduced Senate Bill 1167 or the Indigenous Peoples Resource Centers Act of 2022, which seeks to establish Indigenous Cultural Communities (ICCs) or IP Resource Centers in strategic locations, such as determined by the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP).
Under the proposed measure, these centers will consist of three main areas, such as the statistical service area, the human development index service area and the estate management service area.
He said that the statistical services domain will be responsible for the documentation and recognition of CCIs and IPs, while the human development index services domain will deal with their problems and provide the basic and necessary services by the through relevant government agencies, and the estate management services area will be responsible for promoting participatory programs, projects and activities for them.
“We have over a hundred IP groups in the Philippines, comprising between 14 [and] 17 million CCI. Much has been said to protect the rights and ensure the well-being of our IPs, but the reality is [that] they continue to be among the most disadvantaged groups,” he said in a statement on Saturday.
Angara, citing the World Bank, said while IPs make up only 6% of the world’s population, they make up nearly 20% of the world’s extremely poor.
“What aggravates the situation of our IPs is the absence of reliable public data on ICCs, and more often than not this leads to situations where they are neglected in the provision of basic, social, technical and even legal,” said the senator. said. — News VBL, GMA
