An Act Institutionalizing Support to the Welfare and Care for Orphans by Establishing Bangsamoro Orphanages in the Region, and Providing Funds Thereof

This directs the Bangsamoro Government to establish orphanages in every province and builds the system around them.

An orphaned minor is defined as a child under 18 left without care or guardian by the death of the father, or without proper parental care through the death, disappearance or abandonment by both parents for at least 6 continuous months.

Section 5 creates a monitoring and evaluating system whose membership reaches from the regional ministry down to the barangay: the Ministry of Social Services and Development, the provincial, municipal and city social welfare offices, the interior ministry, and provincial, local and barangay local government units — and then traditional leaders and the religious sector, the Ulama or Imam of each province. Its job is to identify and select qualified beneficiaries by a transparent and cost-efficient method, to keep updated data on the number, location and personal profile of orphaned minors in each community, to develop the appropriate model of orphanage for that community, and to monitor the children once they are in one.

A Comprehensive Support Program is institutionalised covering 6 named needs: basic needs, physical safety and security, socio-economic needs, educational needs, emotional and spiritual needs, and access to justice. A Managing Committee runs each orphanage and trains its staff, and is responsible for every child admitted until that child turns 18.

Section 10 sets the timetable, and it is the only hard target in the bill: the social services ministry is to begin accreditation immediately, with at least 2 accredited orphanages in every province by the end of the transition period and an accredited orphanage in every local government unit by 2025. The ministry may adopt the national department's accreditation standards or write entirely new ones.

Local governments must monitor the orphanages in their jurisdiction and help them toward accreditation, funded from their own appropriations.

The explanatory note rests on one finding, from The Asia Foundation's 2020 study *Children of War: A Rapid Needs Assessment of Orphans in Muslim Mindanao*: there are no orphanages or shelters accredited by the national social welfare department anywhere in the Bangsamoro region.

What follows from that is the rest of the case. Muslim orphans processed in Mindanao are often sent to orphanages in Manila, and the facilities that do serve Bangsamoro children have grown up in the diaspora instead — Maharlika Village in Taguig, Culiat in Quezon City, Quiapo, and Baguio City. A region with its own government, emerging from a conflict that produced the orphans in question, was sending them 900 kilometres away to be cared for.

The 2025 deadline has passed. This bill, filed in October 2022, required an accredited orphanage in every local government unit by 2025 and at least 2 per province by the end of the transition period. It never left committee, so neither target had legal force — but the dates are worth stating plainly, because they are the measure the author chose and the region is now past them with, on the bill's own evidence, no accredited facility of its own.

The Asia Foundation finding is the most consequential sentence in either version of this bill. A region of roughly 5 million people, whose recent history produced a generation of orphans, had no accredited orphanage, and the institutions serving its children had grown up in Manila, Taguig and Baguio. Everything else in the bill — the accreditation timetable, the provincial targets, the discretion to write new standards rather than adopt the national ones — follows from that single absence.

Seating the Ulama or Imam of each province on the monitoring system is the provision that makes this a Bangsamoro bill rather than a transposed national one. Placing an orphaned Muslim child requires knowing the community, the family that might take the child, and the religious obligations that attach to guardianship — and the imam knows those things in a way a provincial social welfare office does not. Including access to justice among the 6 defined needs is the other thoughtful inclusion: a child whose parents were killed may have a claim, an inheritance, or a case, and orphanage statutes rarely notice that.

The funding silence is the structural weakness. A bill can direct a ministry to accredit and a local government to monitor without naming a sum, because those are administrative acts. Building orphanages is not — and the bill that requires 1 in every local government unit by 2025 leaves the cost of them to be found inside existing appropriations.

Bill No. 112 and Bill No. 143 are the same bill. Both carry the title "An Act Institutionalizing Support to the Welfare and Care for Orphans by Establishing Bangsamoro Orphanages", both run to 17 sections with identical headings in identical order, and set side by side the operative texts run to 1,255 words each and match almost word for word — the few differences being scan artefacts rather than drafting. MP Ramos filed hers on 17 October 2022; MP Anayatin filed the same text on 17 January 2023, 3 months later. Both were referred to committee and both are still there.