Catalog

Reaching Out to Payatas Victims
Through the Staff Community Fund, ADB employees help people in need in Manila

By Mariam S. Pal
Economist (Social Development) and
Chairperson, ADB Staff Community Fund

PAYATAS: Children scavenging.

While the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has made reducing poverty its mission in Asia and the Pacific, ADB employees are working to lessen poverty in our own city through the Staff Community Fund (SCF).

Founded in 1997, SCF supports local charities working with the poor in Metro Manila. During 2000, SCF has raised and donated tens of thousands of dollars to 11 charities working in education, health, shelter for street children, and livelihood training.

One of the SCF’s first donations was to the Vincentian Missionaries Social Development Foundation, which has worked since 1990 with scavengers and squatter families living in the Payatas dump site in Quezon City, Metro Manila. Projects have focused on health and medical services, livelihood development, maternal care, savings and credit, housing, scavengers’ welfare, and day care.

SCF donated money in 1998 to help the missionaries build a small day care facility in Payatas for the preschool children of scavengers. In April 2000, a second donation helped expand the day care center. SCF was impressed with the community commitment to and involvement in constructing and maintaining the day care center, which serves an important need of the Payatas residents. The small center handles 120 children in two-hour shifts, five days a week—and all are welcome for a hot lunch.

On 10 July, after a period of heavy rain, a trashslide occurred in the Payatas dump that claimed the lives of at least 200 people, including many children, who were working as scavengers and sorters in the dump and living in shanties in its shadow.

On hearing about the trashslide, the first thing the SCF did was to find out what had happened to the day care center, which would have been full of children at that time. To our great relief, the center had mercifully been spared. But to our horror, we learned that nearly 90 of the 120 children had lost family members or their homes.

SCF decided that emergency relief, although not one of our usual activities, was called for at that time. Contributions large and small came pouring in from ADB staff members. In only four days, US$14,000 was collected, providing testimony to the generous spirits that inhabit the ADB building. The money was immediately used to buy basic necessities, such as drinking water, clothing, and medicine, and to pay for funeral expenses.

Within a few weeks, the authorities closed the dump site—triggering a different crisis: finding new livelihoods.

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