Page 327 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 4

STS700 Candigo J. A., Jr. et al.
On the other hand, certain limitations and caveats are noteworthy to
mention:
• There is no official definition of “all-season” road, i.e., “all-season” road
is usually confused with “all-weather”.
• There are different definitions of urban and rural areas per country and
the classification may change over the years
• The methodology only takes into account the horizontal distance from
the all-season road with no adjustments made on areas with elevation
and presence of water surface.

This paper initially worked on estimating the RAI for the whole Davao
Region and separately for its five provinces. The methodology can be
replicated for other areas of the Philippine to come up with comparisons of
RAI among its 17 regions and 81 provinces. It may be rigorous to estimate for
RAI of municipalities and barangays as it will entail more computational time
considering that there are 1,489 municipalities and 42,045 barangays in the
Philippines as of 2018. Further, it will be difficult to identify the boundaries of
road network since most road networks crosses over more than one barangay.
Future work for the PSA related to RAI include the following:
• Updating of the road network data using data collected from geo-
tagging activities of the PSA.
• Use of the 2020 Census of Population and Housing (CPH) results as
gridded population map.
• For Philippine Statistical System (PSS) to establish official definition of
rural and urban areas.
• Adoption and approval of the methodology for the estimation of RAI
in the Philippines.
• Release of statistics on RAI in the SDG Watch.

References
1. World Bank (2016). “Measuring Rural Access Using New Technologies”
2. Asian Development Bank (2019). Country Training Workshop on Data
Disaggregation using Small Area Estimation and Big Data Analytics

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