The little girl who wanted a pair of shoes: suicide highlights poverty in Philippines

All she wanted was a bicycle, a pair of new shoes and to be able to finish her schooling. But her family was dirt poor, and eventually the 12-year-old Filipina girl grew so demoralised that she hanged herself.

Mariannet Amper left a letter under her pillow describing her failed hopes and aspirations. Her family also found a diary in which she described the privations of a life with no money in Davao City, on southern Mindanao island.

They are among millions of people living in poverty in the Philippines, a country where the gap between haves and have-nots is wide. Mariannet's father, a construction worker, told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that he had been out of work for several months. Her mother works part-time in a noodle factory, earning less than a dollar a day, and takes in laundry.

The night before she killed herself with a nylon rope in their modest hut, which has no electricity or running water, Mariannet had asked her father, Isabelo, for 100 pesos (about £1) for a school project. But he had no money. The next day, he managed to get a 1,000-pesos cash advance for some building work on a chapel. But when he got home to tell her, his daughter was already dead.

"I suspect she did it because of our situation," he told the newspaper.

The letter found under her pillow was addressed to a television programme, I Just Wish, which grants viewers' wishes. In it, Mariannet wrote: "I wish for new shoes, a bag and jobs for my mother and my father. My dad does not have a job and my mum just gets laundry jobs." She added: "I would like to finish my schooling and I would very much like to buy a new bike."

In her diary, Mariannet wrote that she had not attended school for a month. Her parents said she had actually been absent for three days. But they had not had money for her food or transport. In one entry, the girl wrote: "We were not able to hear Mass because we did not have fare and my father had a fever. So my mum and I just washed clothes (for money)."

In the Philippines, nearly 14 per cent of the 87 million population lives on less than a dollar a day, despite government claims that the economy is booming.

President Gloria Arroyo told a business forum yesterday that her economic reforms were bearing fruit. "The common people are now feeling the benefits of a growing economy," she said, announcing that an extra one billion pesos would be given to "hunger mitigation programmes".

In a recent survey, the Social Weather Stations institute found that about nine million Filipino families regarded themselves as poor. Most live in the south of the country. Many of them said they had experienced "severe hunger" in the past three months.

The Global Call for Action Against Poverty, a coalition of anti- poverty groups, said its own research showed that economic growth was not trickling down to the people who needed it.