Economic hardships force Filipinos into city slums

In the Manila garbage dump known as Smokey Mountain, children delve into freshly-dumped piles of refuse, hoping to scavenge enough to get their families through another day in the Philippines.
These children in Tondo, a notoriously poor Manila neighborhood, do not have time to play.
As the competitive advantages of small-time agriculture have dwindled, rural Filipinos have been forced to the city in search of new livelihoods. According to the BBC, two million people live in Manila’s slums and this number continues to grow.
The Philippines is the world’s 14th most-populated country and sits in the belly of Southeast Asia. From 1898 with the end of the Spanish-American War until 1946 when Japan invaded during the Second World War, the Philippines was under U.S. control.
Traces of this colonial past are still evident in the Philippines’ robust guest-worker program. According to the Miami Herald, Filipino workers abroad are expected to send home $15.7 billion this year — making many Filipino families dependent on the greater world’s economy. 
With this summer’s spike in grain prices and the recent economic shakeup, conditions in slums like Tondo will continue to worsen.