18 August 2026
NNC's 2025 Operation Timbang Plus data puts 22 Bicol municipalities at or above the 17.5 per cent stunting threshold. Eleven of them are in Camarines Sur.
Two Bicol provinces sit near the top of the country’s child stunting figures. That much has been reported. What hasn’t been reported is the number underneath it: twenty-two municipalities in Bicol are at or above the stunting rate the national nutrition programme uses to pick where it works, and eleven of those twenty-two are in Camarines Sur, which the programme doesn’t name.
We read the National Nutrition Council’s own 2025 Operation Timbang Plus report on 18 August 2026 and pulled every Bicol row out of it: six provinces, seven cities, 114 municipalities. Here is what the primary document says, including the column nobody quotes.
Stunting means a child is short for their age. It’s the measure that tracks long-run undernutrition rather than a recent illness, which is why programmes target it. The figures below are stunted plus severely stunted, as a share of the children actually measured.
[bb_chart name=”bicol-stunting-2025″ caption=”Read from the NNC 2025 OPT Plus Report, height and length-for-age table, on 18 August 2026. Coverage is the share of each province’s estimated 0 to 59 month population that was measured at all.”]
Masbate is highest at 15.1 per cent, which is 12,484 children. Catanduanes follows at 13.6 per cent, then Camarines Sur at 11.0, Camarines Norte at 9.0, Sorsogon at 7.3 and Albay at 5.9.
The ranking changes if you count children instead of rates. Camarines Sur has 19,560 stunted children, more than any other province in the region and 57 per cent more than Masbate, because it has roughly twice the population of under-fives. A rate tells you how concentrated a problem is. A headcount tells you how many people it is happening to. Both are in the same table and only one of them usually makes the story.
On the separate weight-for-age measure, the order is different again. There Catanduanes is highest in Bicol at 9.0 per cent underweight, Masbate second at 8.5, Camarines Sur third at 5.4. So a phrase like “the malnutrition list” resolves to at least two different rankings depending on which of NNC’s tables you opened.
Operation Timbang is a census attempt, not a sample survey. Barangay health workers try to weigh and measure every child under five, and the report prints how many they reached against the estimated population. That coverage figure is published in the same row as the prevalence figure, and it almost never appears in coverage of the data.
Catanduanes measured 19,298 children out of an estimated 30,621. That’s 63 per cent, so its 13.6 per cent stunting rate describes just under two thirds of its under-fives, and says nothing about the other 11,323. Camarines Sur reached 71.3 per cent, Masbate 71.6, Sorsogon 72.0, Camarines Norte 76.0, Albay 79.5.
Nine Bicol municipalities measured fewer than 60 per cent of their children. Viga in Catanduanes reached 51.3 per cent. Cabusao in Camarines Sur, 52.7. Claveria in Masbate, 53.1, and Claveria is reporting a 31 per cent stunting rate on that half. Whether the children who were missed are more or less likely to be stunted than the ones who were measured isn’t knowable from this document, and it’s the sort of thing that can move a town’s number several points in either direction.
We aren’t adjusting anything for coverage. We’re printing it next to every rate so you can see which numbers rest on a near-complete count and which do not.
The Philippine Multisectoral Nutrition Project selects its sites using two criteria that were made public: a stunting rate of 17.5 per cent or more, and a poverty incidence at or above 21 per cent. In Masbate the project covers 16 of the province’s 21 municipalities, with ₱357,768,299 allocated for 2024 to 2026 and a target year of 2028.
We took the 17.5 per cent line and applied it to the 2025 data across all 114 Bicol municipalities. Twenty-two clear it:
Two caveats matter here and we’re not going to bury them. The project selected its sites in or before 2024, using whatever OPT round was current then, not the 2025 figures we are reading. Towns move between rounds, so this is a comparison of a threshold set then against data published now. Second, the poverty criterion is a real filter we cannot apply, because we don’t have municipal poverty incidence for these towns in front of us. A Camarines Sur town over 17.5 per cent stunting may sit below 21 per cent poverty and fail the second test.
What we can say is narrower and still worth saying. On the most recent published stunting data, more Bicol towns over the threshold are in Camarines Sur than in Masbate, and we found no public document naming a comparable programme for them. If one exists, we’ll publish it.
Albay has the lowest provincial stunting rate in Bicol at 5.9 per cent. Albay also contains Jovellar, where 494 of 1,408 children measured are stunted or severely stunted. That’s 35.1 per cent, the worst municipal figure in the region, in the province that looks best on the chart. Jovellar’s coverage is 84.2 per cent, so this isn’t a thin-data artefact.
The same pattern runs through Sorsogon. The province reports 7.3 per cent and has no town over the threshold, yet Donsol reports 16.3 per cent, which is 709 children and a higher rate than any province in Bicol including Masbate. Donsol measured 71.2 per cent of its under-fives, so 1,757 children there were not measured at all.
Two towns we have already mapped sit at the other end. Malinao reports 2.5 per cent, or 106 children, on 83.7 per cent coverage. Tiwi reports 3.2 per cent, or 155 children, on 77.6 per cent coverage. Neighbouring towns in the same province, about thirteen points below Donsol’s figure and thirty-two below Jovellar’s.
Every Bicol city reports a lower stunting rate than the province it sits in, which is the usual urban pattern and partly a coverage story, since cities generally reached more of their children. The gap isn’t uniform though. Masbate City’s 6.2 per cent still sits above Albay’s provincial average of 5.9.
Sorsogon City is worth a second look. Its rate is low at 2.8 per cent, and its coverage is the lowest of any Bicol city at 69.4 per cent, below five of the six provinces. A city that measures fewer of its children than the average province is publishing a number with more room in it than the figure suggests.
The 2025 results were posted on NNC’s site on 12 March 2026. Three things about that page are worth recording, because a resident or a barangay nutrition scholar trying to check their own town runs into all of them.
The file picker offers a document labelled “2025 OPT Plus Report as of 6 March 2026”. The file it actually serves is named for 18 March 2026, twelve days later, and it’s a locked spreadsheet. A separate advisory dated 14 March 2026 lists what was revised. The PDFs are all marked revision 3.
The “Download PDF” button on the results page is broken. Its link contains an unrendered template placeholder rather than a file address, so it goes nowhere.
And nnc.gov.ph refuses automated requests with a 403, which puts it in the same category as the five Bicol government sites our transparency audit could not score at all. We read the reports in an ordinary browser instead. None of this is hidden data. It’s published data with a difficult front door, and the difference matters to whoever is trying to look up one town.
[bb_chart name=”transparency-scorecard” caption=”Scored on findability, not legal compliance. The same standard applies to a national agency: a report that exists but can’t be downloaded through its own button is a report a resident cannot read.”]
If you hold any of these documents, a 2026 OPT summary, a municipal nutrition action plan, a barangay breakdown, send it and it goes up with attribution. Corrections and additions are here.
On NNC’s 2025 Operation Timbang Plus data, Masbate has the highest child stunting rate in Bicol at 15.1 per cent and Camarines Sur has the most stunted children at 19,560. Twenty-two Bicol municipalities are at or above the 17.5 per cent stunting rate that the national nutrition project uses to select sites, and eleven of them are in Camarines Sur while the funded programme runs in Masbate. Jovellar in Albay has the region’s worst municipal rate at 35.1 per cent, inside the province with the region’s lowest average. Every rate above rests on a coverage figure between 51 and 87 per cent, which is published in the same table and almost never quoted.
Every figure here carries the date it was read, because a number without a date is a number nobody can check. Where our data comes from. You can browse any town’s own page from the LGU directory, or see what national infrastructure money reaches these places on public money in Bicol.
Source Bicolmail Newspaper. Written from the original report.
Published 18 August 2026. Every figure on this site carries its source and the date it was read. Where our data comes from. Something wrong here?