BAGUIO CITY — At least 500,000 indigent residents in the different parts of the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) have benefitted from the numerous interventions made by the Cordillera Regional Development Council (RDC) to make a difference in their lives while it is laying the groundwork for regional development and autonomy.

Dr. Myrna Cabotaje, regional director of the Department of Health (DoH) in the Cordillera and chairman of the RDC-CAR’s social development committee, cited that one of the highlights of their accomplishments was the creation of poverty maps for the pilot towns of Kibungan and Kapangan in Benguet, and Natonin in Mountain Province.

The poverty map is useful in policy legislations and implementation of programs and projects to fight poverty because it provides the implementing agencies accurate data on the poverty incidence in a certain community coupled with the needs of the indigent people.

At the same time, the Cordillera office of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is capitalizing on the influx of tourists in the different parts of the region to train concern individuals in the region to become entrepreneurs, thus, small and medium enterprises in the region have already adopted 165 product designs that are market-driven which could sell briskly to foreign and domestic tourists thereby increasing the income of the indigent people in the countryside.

The Cordillera RDC created sub-committees in order to initiate socio-economic development activities in the grassroots level, especially in poverty-stricken communities in the different parts of the region with regional autonomy as the over arching theme for development.

For the past several years, the Cordillera region’s poverty incidence is always higher than the national average which prompted the region’s policy-making body to come out with appropriate initiatives that could propel rural development in the far-flung communities.