MANILA, Philippines — Only 43 percent of undernourished children aged two to four are covered by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD)’s supplemental feeding program, the Second Congressional Commission on Education said.
EDCOM 2 executive director Karol Mark Yee reported that the DSWD school feeding program covers only about 159,000 children of the 373,000 children suffering from wasting in that age group.
He said that this suggests that roughly 213,000 children are still unable to receive the intervention.
EDCOM 2 emphasized that this severe lack of coverage is largely attributable to logistical and structural failures since the school feeding program is a facility-based intervention.
The program fails to reach the bulk of children who have low participation in early childhood programs or who are not enrolled in daycare centers.
The World Health Organization defines child wasting as a child too thin for his or her height and is the result of recent rapid weight loss or the failure to gain weight.
“Nutrition is an education issue. However, our investments are not strategic, with very little resources allocated for the first 1,000 days and the supplementary feeding program,” Yee said.
“The challenge is that the damage to cognitive development is irreversible in later years,” he added.
Nutrition in the earliest years remains unattended literally and figuratively, he said.
‘Historic funding not enough’
Meanwhile, the P1.004 trillion budget of the Department of Education (DepEd) for 2026 is still far from enough to rebuild an education system in crisis, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) said yesterday.
“Historic does not mean sufficient,” ACT chairperson Ruby Bernardo said.
“Even though the funding is the largest in history, it still does not reach the minimum needed to address the deficiencies and significantly resolve the education crisis,” she added.
Bernardo asserted that the 2026 budget still falls short of the international benchmark of at least six percent of the gross domestic product.
The budget also remains well below the teachers’ demand for a doubled education budget that can comprehensively address sectoral shortages, she maintained.
She said that the education sector continues to suffer from shortages in teachers.
It also suffers from learning resources, damage from recent calamities, support personnel and safe learning spaces, she noted.
The DepEd is also attempting to resolve a classroom backlog of 165,000.
No single budget increase can solve these issues without a long-term and structural approach, she maintained.
Bernardo asked lawmakers and national agencies to ensure that the increased budget will not fall into the same pattern of substandard and “ghost” projects that plagued previous and current administrations.
“For the additional funding to be meaningful, it must be protected against anomalies and theft that exacerbate the crisis,” Bernardo said.
State officials, contractors and engineers have been implicated in anomalous infrastructure deals, budget insertions and kickbacks.