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This chapter investigated the availability of jobs and livelihood in the government-owned Southville Rodriguez Housing Project (SRHP) area in the Philippines for Typhoon Ketsana victims. It started with the case of Bettyline as an illustration of the extreme poverty inside the relocation site due to the lack of employment opportunities and livelihood programs. Despite the assurance of the 2010 Philippine Disaster Risk Management Act (PDRRMA) and other official laws that disaster victims would be provided with a suitable location site and adequate housing with employment and livelihood opportunities under the “build back better” principle, poverty persisted in the SRHP. This chapter clarified the role of the various government agencies in providing jobs and livelihood to disaster victims in relocation sites owned by the government’s National Housing Authority (NHA) but under the jurisdiction of the local government. Despite the plurality of official laws requiring livelihood programs for relocatees, the chapter’s assessment showed that under the present set-up, it is ultimately the semi-autonomous social fields or the social connections between private developers and the government regulating bodies, such as the NHA, that determined the presence or absence of jobs and livelihood in the relocation area. The private developer, with the approval the NHA, had the power to decide whether or not the relocation site would be proximate to employment zones. Moreover, there are no explicit legal provisions in Terms of Reference (TOR) that required developers to comply with the employment and livelihood provisions of the law before building relocation houses and selling them to the NHA. The informal rule of kanya-kanya (individual or group initiative) sidestepped the official law and created unintended consequences to post-disaster recovery of the Typhoon Ketsana victims in the relocation area.

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This page is a summary of: Jobs and Livelihood Program in the Resettlement Area, January 2017, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-981-10-5074-9_7.
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