The Desk

#BetterPH

Is the Philippines really poor? What corruption steals from us.

A 3D rendering of the proposed Upper Marikina River Dam, one of the flood control master plan projects still unbuilt since 2012.

On 31 July 2012, NEDA approved the Metro Manila Flood Management Master Plan. Eleven infrastructure projects running to 2035: a dam in Marikina at ₱198.43 billion, a ring dike around Laguna de Bay, embankments and catch basins along the Marikina watershed, an eight-kilometre dike and pumping station in Camanava. Engineered, costed, signed. Total price, ₱351.72 billion.

Between July 2022 and May 2025, just under three years, DPWH recorded ₱545.64 billion “spent” on 9,855 flood control projects. That is one and a half master plans. The allocation for 2023 to 2025 alone was ₱980.25 billion, which is nearly three.

Senator Lacson puts what was diverted to ghost projects since 2016 at ₱180 billion. That is the scandal, and it is not what the rest of this is about. Everything below is priced against the money nobody says was stolen: what DPWH recorded as spent, and what Congress appropriated.

Zoom out further and it gets worse. “P1.939 trillion funded the DPWH flood control management program under three presidents from 2011-2025 and the result is uncontrolled flood,” Lacson said on 17 August 2026. Almost two trillion pesos, three administrations, and the flooding got worse, not better.

Bar chart comparing the ₱351.7 billion master plan that was never built against the ₱545.6 billion 'spent' on flood control from 2022 to 2025 and the ₱980.3 billion budgeted for it from 2023 to 2025.

So the money was there. It has been there the whole time. It went into 9,855 separate projects scattered across the country, many built badly, many not built at all, and none of them adding up to the system that was already drawn.

The receipt

I wanted to see what else that money buys, so I priced it against things the government has already put a number on. Not the budget, and not the ₱180 billion. Just the ₱545.6 billion DPWH says it already spent.

Start with the master plan itself, at ₱351.7 billion. Build all of it, every dam, dike, embankment and pumping station drawn up in 2012, and you still have ₱193.9 billion in hand.

Reviving the Bataan nuclear plant is $2.3 billion, about ₱141.5 billion at today’s rate, for 621 megawatts we finished building in 1984 and never switched on. Switch it on. ₱52.4 billion left.

A guided-missile frigate is ₱17 billion and we signed for two in December 2025, so take both, at ₱34 billion. A 97-metre Coast Guard patrol vessel, the biggest ship the PCG operates, is ₱4.77 billion, and Japan paid for the last five, so buy two ourselves at ₱9.5 billion. ₱8.9 billion left.

The four Triton naval drones the Americans handed us at Subic in June came to ₱754 million, about ₱188.5 million each. Buy twenty of our own, ₱3.8 billion.

Then put ₱3 billion into a year of free public Wi-Fi at every school, city plaza and barangay hall, which is roughly what DICT says it needs to run and expand the 60,000 sites it will have by the end of 2026.

All of it at once, out of money that has already been disbursed and signed for. And ₱2.1 billion still sitting there when you’re done.

Segmented bar showing the ₱545.6 billion recorded as spent on flood control covering the ₱351.7 billion master plan, the ₱141.5 billion Bataan nuclear plant, two frigates at ₱34 billion, two Coast Guard cutters at ₱9.5 billion, twenty naval drones at ₱3.8 billion and a year of national free Wi-Fi at ₱3 billion, with ₱2.1 billion left over.

What if everything was free

Free public transport sounds like the most expensive idea on the list. It is the cheapest thing here by a wide margin.

LRT-1, LRT-2 and MRT-3 carry roughly 320 million passengers a year. UNESCAP counted 327.68 million in 2019, and 2025 was close to that. At an average fare of about ₱22, the entire farebox for all three lines is around ₱7 billion a year. Making every train in Metro Manila free costs about the same as one Coast Guard patrol boat. Annually. ₱980.3 billion, the whole three-year flood control budget, is 140 years of every train in Metro Manila running free.

Buses and jeepneys are bigger but not by as much as you’d think. Metro Manila has 14.94 million people and a 2022 SWS survey found 94% of them own no car. Call it 12 million public transport trips a day at an average fare of ₱20. That’s roughly ₱88 billion a year to make every train, bus and jeepney in Metro Manila free, and I’m rounding up.

Ten years of that is ₱880 billion. The 2023 to 2025 flood control budget was ₱980.25 billion. Eleven years of free rides for everyone in Metro Manila, already appropriated, spent on projects that didn’t hold.

Bar chart showing that making every train free for a decade costs ₱70 billion and every train, bus and jeepney free for a decade costs ₱880 billion, against the ₱980.3 billion budgeted for flood control from 2023 to 2025.

Luxembourg made all public transport free nationwide in February 2020. Malta followed in October 2022. Tallinn has been fare-free for residents since 2013. Belgrade, a city of 1.4 million, went free in January 2025.

The teachers

There are 910,434 public school teachers in this country. A Teacher I earns ₱31,705 a month. Between 2022 and 2023 the headcount fell by 21,475, and Secretary Angara named the reasons: retirement, migration for better opportunities abroad, and no way to move up. Other countries recruit our English teachers on purpose.

Give every one of those 910,434 teachers ₱10,000 more a month and it costs ₱109.3 billion a year. DepEd is also 143,543 classrooms short as of July 2026, and the 2026 budget prices a classroom at ₱2.6 million, so closing the entire national backlog costs ₱373.2 billion. The Second Congressional Commission on Education says that backlog takes over 20 years to close at the rate we are going.

Then there is the food. The 2026 School-Based Feeding Programme is ₱25.6 billion for 200 feeding days across 4.63 million learners, the largest it has ever been, and in a single year the number of severely wasted kindergarteners fell from 113,451 to 47,281. Two more years of it at that level costs ₱51.2 billion. A child who is hungry at seven in the morning does not learn at eight, and we already know the price of fixing that.

Do all three. Build every missing classroom in the country, all 143,543 of them, pay every public school teacher ₱10,000 more a month for five straight years, and keep the feeding programme running at its record level for two more. That comes to ₱970.7 billion of the ₱980.3 billion Congress appropriated for flood control between 2023 and 2025, and there is ₱9.6 billion left at the end of it.

Segmented bar showing the ₱980.3 billion budgeted for flood control covering all 143,543 missing classrooms at ₱373.2 billion, a ₱10,000 monthly raise for every public school teacher for five years at ₱546.3 billion and two years of the national school feeding programme at ₱51.2 billion, with ₱9.6 billion left over.

The teacher who stays is the whole thing. She is the one who decides whether a kid in a public school in Bulacan ends up an engineer, or a scientist, or a nurse who also leaves. We keep treating that as a values problem, something about vocation and sacrifice and how teaching is a calling. It’s a pricing problem, and we priced it at ₱31,705.

The health of it

The cheapest thing on this whole list is the one that removes a cancer.

DOH pays ₱4,000 a dose for HPV vaccine, two doses per girl. The 2024 round reached 505,010 nine-year-old girls, which the department put at 64.48% of target, so a full cohort is about 783,000 girls. That’s ₱6.3 billion a year to vaccinate every nine-year-old girl in the Philippines. Do it for a generation and cervical cancer stops being a thing that happens here. Australia is on track to eliminate it by 2035 doing exactly this.

The entire national cancer programme, the Cancer Assistance Fund plus the Cancer Control Programme, got ₱2.5 billion for 2026. A flu shot for every Filipino, 115 million doses at ₱400, is about ₱46 billion a year by my own rough count. Fund all three for ten years and it comes to ₱548 billion, a bit over half the flood control budget, with ₱432.3 billion still on the table.

Programmes are not buildings, and ₱432.3 billion is a lot of building. The cancer centre going up at UP-PGH is ₱9.49 billion for 300 beds and three linear accelerator bunkers. Put one of those in all 33 highly urbanised cities and it costs ₱313.2 billion. Add a heart centre, a lung centre and a kidney institute for the Visayas and Mindanao, six more at the same price, and that’s ₱56.9 billion. Finish and fund the Virology and Vaccine Institute in Capas, the one we started after the pandemic, for ₱2 billion.

All of it, and ₱60.1 billion is still sitting there. For scale, the entire Department of Science and Technology, the new National AI Center included, runs on ₱30.4 billion a year.

Segmented bar showing the ₱980.3 billion budgeted for flood control covering ten years of flu shots for every Filipino at ₱460 billion, a cancer centre in all 33 highly urbanised cities at ₱313.2 billion, ten years of HPV vaccination at ₱63 billion, heart, lung and kidney centres for the Visayas and Mindanao at ₱56.9 billion, ten years of the national cancer programme at ₱25 billion and the Virology and Vaccine Institute at ₱2 billion, with ₱60.1 billion left over.

The lights

Power is the one place where this money actually runs out.

The Department of Energy says the country needs 43,765 MW of new capacity by 2040. Nothing in this article closes that, and anybody who tells you one budget line can is selling something.

Restarting Bataan is ₱141.5 billion for 621 MW, and that is Luzon started. A new APR1400, the Korean reactor the UAE built at Barakah, runs about ₱492.1 billion for 1,400 MW, and that is what Barakah actually cost rather than what it was bid at: $32 billion for four units against the $20 billion on the original contract. Put that one in the Visayas. Mindanao gets an MTerra, the 3,500 MW solar and battery build Meralco is putting up across Nueva Ecija and Bulacan for around ₱200 billion, currently the largest project of its kind anywhere.

That still leaves ₱146.7 billion, and Luzon draws more power than the other two grids combined, so put it back there at the rate MTerra costs per megawatt. Another 2,500 MW of solar and storage, ₱142.9 billion.

Every grid gets a plant, Luzon gets two, and the bill comes to ₱976.4 billion with ₱3.8 billion to spare. 8,021 MW, which is nearly a fifth of everything the DOE says we need by 2040, bought with three years of flood control money.

Segmented bar showing the ₱980.3 billion budgeted for flood control covering a new 1,400 MW nuclear plant for the Visayas at ₱492.1 billion, 3,500 MW of solar and storage for Mindanao at ₱200 billion, a further 2,500 MW of solar and storage for Luzon at ₱142.9 billion and the Bataan plant restarted at ₱141.5 billion, with ₱3.8 billion left over.

We are not poor

Every time somebody proposes free transport or a funded cancer programme or a real raise for teachers, the answer is the same. There’s no money. We’re a developing country. Be realistic.

I’ve believed a version of that for most of my adult life. Then I looked at the company we keep. Vietnam’s GDP per head is $4,829 against our $4,270. On that $559 difference they opened the Hanoi metro in November 2021 and the Ho Chi Minh City metro in December 2024. Indonesia is at $5,082 and opened the Jakarta MRT in 2019 while building an entirely new capital. Thailand is at $8,057 and has covered cancer under universal health coverage since 2002.

Table comparing GDP per person for the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Serbia and Malta against what each country already provides.

We are the poorest country on that list by a small margin, and the only one that appropriated ₱980 billion for flood control and still ended up here.

The money was found. It was appropriated, released, disbursed and signed for. It just didn’t turn into anything.

That’s a different problem from being poor, and it has different people responsible for it.

As a people, we have to raise our standards. It has been raining for three weeks straight and the floods are back. There is some hope in that people are starting to realize we deserve better. We should start asking more from our government, starting with the people we put there.

Stay vigilant. We are all in this together.

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Mig Molina is a strategist and writer based in Manila.