Anna Fionah L. Bojos
Life in Cebu City: Longer, yes,
but is it also getting better?
A baby born in Cebu City can expect, on the average, to live 69 years if male and 72 years if female.
This life expectancy at birth is higher than the national rates, at 62 years for males and 65 years for females.
But this isn't, of course, the only measure of how livable Cebu is.
Based on criteria such as clean air, affordable housing, good roads and public transport, low crime, quality health care and others, Asiaweek magazine rated Cebu City as the 13th best city in Asia last year. It was ranked the 8th best city in Asia in 1996.
A paper on the demographics of Cebu City shows that an "average resident" of Cebu City has many advantages over "the average Filipino." This is in terms of life expectancy and basic services such as education and garbage collection, among others.
"The city, in terms of facilities and services it offers, is not yet another Metro Manila," said Fr. Wilhelm Flieger, in his paper on selected demographic and socio-economic characteristics of Cebu City.
Flieger, head of the Office of Population Studies (OPS) at the University of San Carlos, wrote the paper for a meeting of the International Advisory Committee of the Asian Urban Information Center of Kobe held in 1996.
The report was based on information from the 1990 Census of Population and Housing and from the 1990 Census of Barangays.
City Health Officer Dr. Tomas Fernandez, on the other hand, said Cebu City has remained livable because of its delivery of basic services and infrastructure development.
Aside from the health indicators, he pointed out the low level of pollution, smooth-flowing traffic and availability of skilled manpower.
"The City (Government) is doing a tightrope act. It's trying to balance between trying to grow as fast as it can as well as reaching down to help others," he observed.
That is why the City has yet to fully solve problems such as the housing shortage and job employment, said Fernandez, also head of City Hall's basic services cluster team.
Cebu City, however, enjoys a "better than average" health situation.
Flieger observed that this is related to the fact that the City has the second largest concentration of medical facilities after Manila.
In the Asiaweek survey of 1997, Cebu City had 3.3 hospital beds per 1,000 people, quite close to Singapore which had 3.5 hospital beds per 1,000.
Aside from noting the life expectancy at birth, Flieger also pointed out that the city has low crude death rate at 5.3 for males and 4.2 for females, compared with the national rate of 8.3 for males and 6.5 for females.
Cebu City also has a high literacy rate of 96.9 percent which is at par with that of the urban areas of the country. For Cebu province, the rate is 95.5 percent as observed by Flieger.
Cebu City has seven universities and several colleges and many who come here to study also stay after graduation.
In terms of employment, Cebu City was only partially able to meet expectations, especially for men. The national unemployment rate for new entrants (12.7 percent) and experienced labor force (4.3 percent) differed little from the City's 12.9 percent unemployment rate for newcomers and 4.8 percent for experienced hands.
"For women, unemployment rates in Cebu City are below the corresponding national unemployment rate for both new (18 percent) and experienced workers (10.3 percent), thus meeting the common expectations of jobseekers arriving in Cebu from elsewhere."
In terms of housing, approximately one percent of urban households live in makeshift dwellings.
As for access to power, 83 percent of Cebu City households use electricity, higher than the national record of 55 percent.
According to the 1990 Census of Barangays, 63 out of 80 Cebu City barangays had access to electricity but only 55 percent of these households used it.
Despite the water shortage, two-thirds of Cebu City residents are supplied with water by the Metro Cebu Water District (MCWD) and only 11 percent get water from unsafe sources such as dug wells, springs or rivers, and peddlers.
Nationwide, 27 percent of households use unsafe water sources.
On waste disposal, Cebu City rated poorly since the number of households with exclusive use of water-sealed toilets was barely above ahlf (58 percent) while in Metro Manila, the percentage was 91 percent.
As for solid waste, 47 percent of Cebu City households relied on the City's garbage collection service. Only one-sixth of the households nationwide enjoy this service.
Cebu City also exceeded the national average in terms of ownership of radio sets (78 percent) television (58 percent) and telephones (11 percent).
But still Cebu City is "lagging behind Metro Manila" with respect to household telephone connections and number of motor vehicles and TVs per household, noted Flieger.
He pointed out that more than 95 percent of all phone connections in the country were in urban areas.
Fernandez also said the City needs to do more, especially in power generation and in providing for mass transportation, to maintain its livability.
A plan would guide the City officials in working to improve the living stndards of its constituents, he said.
"If we only have a plan that has been set for 10 years it will not matter who the mayor is," he added.
Published on Feb. 23, 1998
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