Quite embarrassing. My last blog was on 03 Dec, a few days before we left for the project monitoring mission outside the country. I recall I was trying to look back at our Ilaw ng Buhay (Light of Life) experience in community development. Must be able to resume that journey soon.
But, first, let me just try to explain how things went with our field mission and where are we now in the project. John Maraguinot, the deputy manager, and I went on this 25-day mission in December to our project sites in Rajshahi, Bangladesh; Guntur, India; and Thimphu, Bhutan. John M (we refer to him as such so we will not confuse it with John Vistal who is the head of the Project Oversight Committee) took care of the financial compliance part of the mission, while I was responsible for the project monitoring component.
I will confine myself to talking abou the monitoring part.
What we would like to monitor was the current status of the project vis-a-vis producing the expected key output, which is to bring about the complementation of two tools, Poverty Database Monitoring System (PDMS) and ecoBUDGET, local-level planning and in the process, achieve significant access to services by communities and households as provided by local governments.
The project was supposed to be on its final year in 2012 but due to problems associated with financial and reporting compliance, there was delay in funding which disrupted the implementation of some critical activities and hence, the extension for six months or until July, 2013.
I have actually reported on the highlights of the monitoring mission in a report given to the donor, the European Union, and the project partners in the various countries, including our partner international NGO, ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives). I put text and pictures, too, in my Facebook accounts based on the key findings and recommendations during the first week of January, a few days after we arrived.
It has been a joy to report that despite financial constraints, everything was on track in producing the key output: the environmental master budget has been prepared and approved by the highest government authorities in each municipality or city; the household poverty surveys based on the PDMS methodology have been undertaken; and that out of three pilot sites, it is only in Guntur that the software has not been installed.
Now our admin and finance staff are doing everything to bring Tony Irving, the British IT Expert to Guntur to see how to proceed with modifying the software taking into account revisions made on it to suit local conditions. We all hope this can happen soon because Guntur is by far the project site with a pronounced institutional framework to make PDMS+ecoBUDGET sustainable. It has an agency at State level, at Andha Pradesh, focused on providing technical assistance to local governments in establishing a poverty database and using it to prepare poverty reduction plans and projects. At municipal level, it has a poverty alleviation unit with community organizers working with a network of POs and NGOs in targeted slum communities trained to help these communities prepare plans and implement projects.
Political commitment to environmental causes is high in both the government and community levels. This is the ideal situation to come up with a baseline on the poverty and environmental situation in a given area, generate local plans and prepare, implement and monitor catalyst projects using the two tools.
It is a joy to report all these considering it was the Swiss external evaluator herself who helped convince the donor to find the funding resources to bring us to see the actual situation happening in our projects. We thought we would see nothing but problems due to the financial constraints met by all project partners. What we saw instead was the resourcefulness of local governments and communities to make do with what they have and proceed to implement activities towards the achievement of the expect output.
What we saw during our project monitoring mission gave us new optimism to proceed with the project given this remarkable commitment on the part of the people we work with in the DReAMS (Development of Resources for Access to Municipal Services) project.
But, first, let me just try to explain how things went with our field mission and where are we now in the project. John Maraguinot, the deputy manager, and I went on this 25-day mission in December to our project sites in Rajshahi, Bangladesh; Guntur, India; and Thimphu, Bhutan. John M (we refer to him as such so we will not confuse it with John Vistal who is the head of the Project Oversight Committee) took care of the financial compliance part of the mission, while I was responsible for the project monitoring component.
I will confine myself to talking abou the monitoring part.
What we would like to monitor was the current status of the project vis-a-vis producing the expected key output, which is to bring about the complementation of two tools, Poverty Database Monitoring System (PDMS) and ecoBUDGET, local-level planning and in the process, achieve significant access to services by communities and households as provided by local governments.
The project was supposed to be on its final year in 2012 but due to problems associated with financial and reporting compliance, there was delay in funding which disrupted the implementation of some critical activities and hence, the extension for six months or until July, 2013.
I have actually reported on the highlights of the monitoring mission in a report given to the donor, the European Union, and the project partners in the various countries, including our partner international NGO, ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives). I put text and pictures, too, in my Facebook accounts based on the key findings and recommendations during the first week of January, a few days after we arrived.
It has been a joy to report that despite financial constraints, everything was on track in producing the key output: the environmental master budget has been prepared and approved by the highest government authorities in each municipality or city; the household poverty surveys based on the PDMS methodology have been undertaken; and that out of three pilot sites, it is only in Guntur that the software has not been installed.
Now our admin and finance staff are doing everything to bring Tony Irving, the British IT Expert to Guntur to see how to proceed with modifying the software taking into account revisions made on it to suit local conditions. We all hope this can happen soon because Guntur is by far the project site with a pronounced institutional framework to make PDMS+ecoBUDGET sustainable. It has an agency at State level, at Andha Pradesh, focused on providing technical assistance to local governments in establishing a poverty database and using it to prepare poverty reduction plans and projects. At municipal level, it has a poverty alleviation unit with community organizers working with a network of POs and NGOs in targeted slum communities trained to help these communities prepare plans and implement projects.
Political commitment to environmental causes is high in both the government and community levels. This is the ideal situation to come up with a baseline on the poverty and environmental situation in a given area, generate local plans and prepare, implement and monitor catalyst projects using the two tools.
It is a joy to report all these considering it was the Swiss external evaluator herself who helped convince the donor to find the funding resources to bring us to see the actual situation happening in our projects. We thought we would see nothing but problems due to the financial constraints met by all project partners. What we saw instead was the resourcefulness of local governments and communities to make do with what they have and proceed to implement activities towards the achievement of the expect output.
What we saw during our project monitoring mission gave us new optimism to proceed with the project given this remarkable commitment on the part of the people we work with in the DReAMS (Development of Resources for Access to Municipal Services) project.
