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.

This is the clearest case of duplicate legislation in the registry, and it is worth being exact about the evidence rather than calling the 2 bills similar. Normalise both operative texts and they contain the same number of words — 1,255 — and match to better than 95%, with the residual differences traceable to scan noise and page furniture. Seventeen sections, same headings, same order, same definitions, same 2025 deadline, same 6 categories of need.

What that tells you is not that anybody acted improperly. Model bills circulate, civil society organisations draft text and offer it to whoever will file it, and the Asia Foundation study both versions rely on was published for exactly that purpose. Two members filing the same text 3 months apart is what happens when a subject has an obvious champion text and no coordinating mechanism inside Parliament to notice it has already been filed.

The cost of that is visible in the outcome. Both bills went to committee and both stopped. The same thing happened, on a larger scale, to the 8 competing topnotcher and athlete incentive bills — filed within 1 week of each other, referred to the same 2 committees on the same day 16 months later, none enacted. Duplication does not merely waste drafting effort; it splits the sponsorship of a subject so that no single measure carries the weight of a member's reputation, and committees receive 2 identical papers instead of 1 with 2 names on it.

The substance deserves better than that. The finding underneath both bills — that the region had no accredited orphanage and sent its orphans to Manila — is among the sharpest facts in the registry, and the deadline both bills set for fixing it has now passed.

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.