The BARMM Literacy Crisis Is a War Problem; Treat It Like One

*Seven of ten school divisions with the worst reading rates are in the Bangsamoro. This is not a coincidence.*

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The EDCOM 2 literacy data on readers triggered a predictable response: more reading programs, more teacher training, more classroom budgets and also questioning the structure, organization and competence of the BARMM’s MBHTE.

These responses miss the point entirely.

Seven of the ten school divisions with the highest percentage of struggling readers in the Philippines are in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. Tawi-Tawi tops the list at 75.60%. Maguindanao del Norte at 65.38%. The Special Geographic Area at 64.49%. Sulu, Maguindanao del Sur, Lamitan City, Basilan — all in the top ten. All above 57%.

The Comprehensive Rapid Literacy Assessment was not designed to measure the cost of war. But that is exactly what it has done.

The One Data Point That Tells the Whole Story

Before I explain why, I want to draw attention to a single number: Zamboanga City, ranked fourth nationally at 60.72%.

Zamboanga City is not in BARMM. It is part of Region IX. It has a different administration, different funding channels, different governance. It falls entirely outside the Bangsamoro government’s political jurisdiction.

If this were a governance problem — the new autonomous region still finding its footing — Zamboanga City would not be on this list. If it were a poverty problem, dozens of equally poor divisions outside Mindanao would rank higher. If it were about language of instruction, you would expect a wider geographic scatter.

What Zamboanga City shares with the BARMM divisions above it is not an administrative classification. It is the Moro conflict. In September 2013, an MNLF faction launched a siege that displaced 119,714 people, closed schools for three months, and affected 200,000 students. Five years later, families still had not returned. As recently as February 2025, ninety-two MNLF members gathered in the city under senior leadership. Eight shooting incidents have occurred since January. The AFP has reinforced checkpoints at the city’s outskirts.

Zamboanga City is not an anomaly. It is the control group. The variable it shares with Tawi-Tawi, Sulu, and the Maguindanao provinces is armed conflict.

What Research Has Already Told Us — And We Have Ignored

UNESCO named the Philippines in its 2011 Education for All report specifically because of the Mindanao insurgency. The report’s finding was stark: non-attendance rates in the former ARMM were more than four times the national average. Twelve percent of 7 to 16-year-olds had no education at all, compared to 2 percent nationally.

That report was published fifteen years ago.

The 2008 fighting between government forces and the MILF displaced 700,000 people — the world’s largest displacement event at that time. Schools became evacuation centers. Teachers fled. Children spent months in makeshift classrooms or none at all.

The children displaced in 2008 are now in their late teens and early twenties. Their younger siblings are in school today. Generational trauma in literacy is not a metaphor. It is a measurable transmission that shows up in every assessment cycle.

Here’s more: 2008 was not exceptional. It was simply the largest in a decades-long pattern of displacement, disruption, and partial recovery that has never fully stopped. The Bangsamoro people have been living in and around active armed conflict for longer than most of their children’s teachers have been alive.

Add to this that a 2024 UN Secretary-General report documented 53% of all grave violations against children in the Philippines occurring in Mindanao. As of December 2023, 135,820 internally displaced persons remained in the region. Three armed groups were still actively recruiting children: Abu Sayyaf, BIFF, and the NPA. The children being assessed for reading ability are children growing up inside this.

What Must Happen

I am not arguing that reading programs are useless. The MBHTE’s work is real, and 700 classrooms built since 2019 represent genuine effort. But if we treat the CRLA results as an education problem with an education solution, we will spend billions and remain confused when the numbers barely move.

The Philippine government must be honest about what this data is measuring. It is measuring the cost of a conflict that has not ended — the educational bill that comes due when a peace process produces agreements but not resolution, when communities remain armed and afraid, when a peace dividend is promised but never delivered.

The President must treat the BARMM literacy crisis for what it is: a national security and peacebuilding failure, not an education bureaucracy problem.

The BTA Parliament and the MBHTE must work with the national government to resolve the funding confusion that caused national education programs to be pulled back from BARMM after the Bangsamoro Organic Law was passed. Children in the region lost access to programs their counterparts elsewhere kept — not because of the transition government’s failure, but because of Manila’s administrative negligence.

International development partners must stop funding literacy programs in isolation and start demanding that education investments in BARMM are matched by serious, measurable progress on the remaining conflict drivers: armed group normalization, displacement recovery, and genuine community security.

You cannot read your way out of a conflict zone.

The CRLA data is not a report card on the BARMM education system. It is a report card on the peace process. And on that measure, the score is far worse than 75.60%.

The question is whether the people with the power to change these numbers are willing to acknowledge what they are actually looking at.

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Camilo “Bong” Montesa of Cagayan de Oro is a lawyer and professor based in Pasig City. He has spent three decades in conflict and peacebuilding work in the Philippines.)