REACHING THE UNREACHED THROUGH
UN-ASSISTED PROJECTS :
I had my
first experience getting involved with UN-assisted projects in early 1974 when I was transferred from a
military camp where I had stayed for three months serving a prison term as a
detainee under the Martial Law regime of President Ferdinand Marcos to Nayong
Pilipino, a sprawling national park of sort near the Manila International
Airport highlighting products from the country’s dozen or so regions. and where
the offices of projects identified with the First Lady, Mrs. Imelda R. Marcos,
were located.
These
projects included the Green Revolution, which promoted backyard food production
in support of the country’s child nutrition program; Environmental Center of
the Philippines, which sought to create broad public awareness about the
importance of protecting the environment largely through health and sanitation
measures at that time, such as making sure that each household has toilets,
potable water supply and facilities for garbage collection and disposal; and Project Compassion which aimed to
integrate services from these programs and those from other agencies under the
First Lady (Nutrition Center of the Philippines; Population Center of the Philippines)
into an integrated package in response to local government plans and those
articulated by local communities.
Project Compassion
Atty. Ramon
P. Binamira, directly serving under the First Lady’s office, was designated
head of Project Compassion to bring about this much-desired integration of
social services. He was known as the country’s Father of Community Development,
having served as the country’s first Presidential Assistant for Community Development
(PACD), under then Pres. Ramon Magsaysay in the 1950s, a pioneering effort to bring systematically
government services to the remote rural villages more than ten kilometers or so
from the town center, where government offices were mostly located.
I was
appointed Information Officer for the Green Revolution Program and less than a
year later, concurrently, as Special
Assistant on Planning and Operations at the office of Atty. Binamira. In this
latter position, I had to work with pioneers of the country’s community
development program, around thirty (30} of them, who had by this time retired.
Some of them had served in other countries, such as Vietnam and Laos. Under
Project Compassion, they were recruited and assigned as trainers and community
organizers to field-test and coordinate efforts to bring about integration of
services in several provinces and cities primarily to complement similar government
efforts under the then Ministry of Human Settlements, a pet project of the
First Lady, Imelda R. Marcos.
They were
around 15 years older than I was during that time. All of us shared one thing
in common during this initial period of Project Compassion: our projects
classified as under the private sector were not given government budget. We did
not have enough money for our salary and to implement our plans to bring about
the envisioned integration of social services. I remember during this time we
were allowed to use the First Lady’s name to conduct fund raising campaigns for
Project Compassion and its component projects.
Fund Raising for a
Cause
For almost a
year, we functioned as a fund-raising entity as we went around the country to
raise money and conduct awareness meetings about the need for the integration
of services “to deliver social services to the doorstep of each family, “ a
phrase we used in those days to describe our mission. Some of the fund-rasing activities we
undertook include the following: a one peso donation drive which featured selling
tickets raffled on national TV with the country’s movie stars and with prizes
from corporate donors; a boxing champonship match; production of a commercial
movie, “Sapin Sapin Patong Patong,” which served as vehicle for family planning
messages, starring the country’s most popular love team; and cockfighting in
key towns and cities.
I recall
that we put the PHP 10 million raised through these fund raising activities to
a trust fund and we agreed to use the interest in paying for our salaries and
travel expenses to project sites in pilot cities and municipalities all over
the country. We did not have funds for training and field operations
activities, such as monitoring; consultations with local leaders; organizing
neighborhood or local associations; setting up small-scale demonstration projects,
such as homeyard gardens; emergency food assistance to malnourished children.
Linkage with UNICEF
That was how
UNICEF Manila came to the rescue. Our friends from the national planning body, the
National Economic Development Authority (NEDA), introduced us to the staff of this
international organization Their program officers were mostly Filipinos which
made it easier to relate with them. The UNICEF Representative at that time, Dr.
Wah Wong, became interested in what we were doing when he learned that our
community development activities could reach children in remote villages. He
went with us to some villages in the interior towns of in two provinces, Quezon and Camarines Norte,
and saw the need for additional weighing scales used for Operation Timbang . He
promptly had them delivered to our field workers within two weeks.
Starting
1976, program officers from UNICEF Manila accompanied field workers from
Project Compassion in the conduct of child nutrition activities, such as weighing
of children; promotion of breastfeeding; and feeding of malnourished
children. UNICEF assistance began to
trickle in to support these activities. Dr. Wah Wong and the program staff were
attracted to the mission of Project Compassion to “reach the unreached” through
organizing local communities themselves and training them through their local
leaders to mobilize families through their neighborhood associations.
The whole
barangay or village was organized into 20-family units, and their Unit Leaders,
chosen by the member families themselves, were trained by the project on the basics of
planning and service delivery. During this time, there was a global
preoccupation on so-called barefoot volunteers or workers to link communities
to the service delivery system of government and their partner NGO or private
sector counterpart. I recall Atty. Binamira telling the staff that Mrs. Marcos
was quite elated upon learning about the project using trained Unit Leaders in
distributing nutrition food packs, seeds or seedling for backyard gardens,
condoms and pills, and other commoditiies, etc. because this was like what she
saw during her visit to China – the use of local volunteers or “barefoot
workers” as part of the government’s extension services in the rural areas.
I recall
that UNICEF Manila commissioned a non-government research group, the Sinag
research team, to document the participatory process and the impact of
mobilizing local volunteers to the service coverage of nutrition and other
social programs. The study was able to prove that the service delivery coverage
improved significantly with the recruitment, training and deployment of these
“barefoot workers” from the local communities.
In 1977,
Project Compassion’s project sites were included in the itinerary of members of
the International Board of UNICEF during their meeting in Manila. The Board
concluded after the visit to various sites in the country that the Project
Compassion approach to the delivery of services for children was in line with
the Basic Services Strategy being promoted globally at that time by the UN
which stressed the importance of community involvement and participation in the
planning and implementation of child-focused projects.
Involvement with
GOP-UNICEF Country Program for Children
Soon after
this event, I was assigned to represent Project Compassion in the Technical
Working Group preparing the four-year Government of the Philippines – UNICEF
Country Program for Children (CPC 1). I recall that my assignment was to review
the participatory aspect of proposals submitted by government and NGOs seeking
funding from UNICEF. Due to my involvement for almost a year in CPC 1, I came
to understand the planning process regarding social development promoted by
UNICEF and began to appreciate the tasks and functions of planning officers of
various government agencies involved in planning for child rights and welfare.
On account
of my role within the technical working group as a resource person on social
mobilization and community development, I was allowed by the military to join
meetings outside Nayong Pilipino and to participate in workshops and field trips to other cities and
municipalities outside Metro Manila. When a task force was formed for
multisectoral consultations in all the country’s twelve regions, I was included
to give first-hand account of how to use what we called child focus in
justifying service delivery in remote villages in various geographic locations
such as mountains; isolated islands; and densely-populated but equally
neglected slum urban areas or those communities occupied by people known as
squatters or euphemistically classified as informal settlers in planning
documents.
This
advocacy for participatory development through focus on the child helped us
organize communities despite the restrictions imposed by the martial law regime
on all forms of organizing efforts. It will be recalled that an assembly of
more than three people could be declared illegal during that time. By talking
about infant mortality, child malnutrition, school drop-out rate and other
child-based indicators, we were allowed to organize communities from the purok
or neighborhood level to the barangay or village level.
In 1978,
UNICEF Manila provided funds to enable Project Compassion to conduct a study on
community development approaches implemented in the country; identify their
respective strengths and weaknesses; and recommend ways to modify, if
necessary, its practices. For three months, all its fieldworkers most of whom
were considered pioneers starting with the PACD in the 1950s, met at the Nayong
Pilipino. Resource persons from UP Los Banos, Philippine Business for Social
Progress (PBSP) and other NGOs were invited to share their experiences and
lessons. Project Compassion and UNICEF program officers together assessed the
lessons learned and field-tested new ideas in organizing communities in several
barangays in Lucena City and Candelaria City.
Birth of Ilaw ng Buhay
(Light of Life) Approach
The approach
which resulted from such collaboration was an operations manual for a modified
approach to the practice of community development in the country called the
“Ilaw ng Buhay” (Light of Life) sometimes termed as CO-CD which combines
community organizing with the standard community development strategy of
linking communities and families to service providers from the sectoral
agencies of the Government. The child focus as entry point in community organizing
featured use of child-based indicators as malnutrition, infant mortality, and
school drop-out were given priority through inclusion in household
surveys, training and local planning
inputs.
Three
20-family units of Project Compassion were combined to make up a chapter of
Ilaw ng Buhay with members voting for their officers who were eventually
trained by the mobile core team of trainers from Project Compassion and UNICEF
program officers and their local counterparts from relevant LGU partners, such
as the religious and private sectors. Existing training modules were revised
based on this modified approach to organizing local communities and training
the Ilaw ng Buhay chapters.
By 1981,
Project Compassion was recognized as one of the country’s quite visible
demonstration of community participation in the planning and implementation of
child-based programs. This was apparent in the number of invitations received
by Atty. Binamira to speak in UNICEF-sponsored fora promoting the Basic
Services Strategy of the UN in the country and abroad. During the period,
UNICEF Manila assigned a number of Filipino program officers to work hand in
hand with the staff in encouraging local governments to formulate, implement
and monitor child-based programs.
Through the
Country Program for Children, UNICEF progressively supported Project Compassion
with funding for the expansion of its coverage areas. I can still recall the
names of UNICEF program officers assigned to Project Compassion during this
critical period of Project Compassion’s growth: Willy Castillo, Bituin
Gonzales, Brenda Vigo, Richard Prado and Wilfred D’Silva; the last one was the
only non-Filipino in the group, a Bangladeshi, who was Deputy Resident
Representative, Dr. Pratima Kale, an Indian national, who understood what we
were all trying to do, generating people’s participation, under a hostile
poltical situation.
At around
this time, too, I gained full freedom. I did not have to get permission to
attend meetings or to travel outside Metro Manila. I could finally say goodbye
to the floors at the Green Revolution office I was sleeping on; the Quezon
Display booth I lived in during the last two years of my six-year stay in this
Nayong Pilipino Complex adjacent to the Domestic Airport, and, hence, goodbye
to the deepening noise of planes during take-off and when their engines had to
be warmed up; the sight of men in military uniform all over the place when top officials and foreign
dignitaries and their families and staff whiled away their time prior to their arrivals
and departures; goodbye to all the fear and trembling caused by thoughts about
an uncertain future and the need to take care of my Mother, Grandmother and
sister whom I left behind so be part of a mass movement which made heroes of 33
of my close friends in what we wrongly thought as the right way to ignite the
Great Proletarian Revolution, “encircling the cities from the countryside,” as
we used to say as regular mantra to quiet the pangs of hunger rapidly creeping
in to wrap our souls in dread and deep longing for home ...
Cecilio
Adorna, who by this time, had been recruited to join the regional office in
Bangkok, managed to arrange my initial consultancies abroad. Subsequently, UNICEF
Manila gave me travel grants and scholarships to enable me to “to mend my
academic fences,” as Regional Deputy Rep D’Silva and the staff used to say
during my post-detention days. I was
sent to attend short-term courses at the Bangladesh Academy for Rural
Development (BARD) in Comilla, Bangladesh and the University of Bradford in
England. I continued to serve as volunteer member of the Country Program for
Children, this time as head of the monitoring committee composed of NGOs and government
agencies coordinated by NEDA.
Ilaw International
Center
While I was
about to apply for graduate study at the University of Swansea, I was informed
by UNICEF Manila that the proposal submitted to the Technical Working Group
prior to my departure for England, was approved. I had no choice but to come
back and postponed implementation of the UNICEF-approved study plan.
I arrived in
Tagbilaran City on 08 November 1982 with instruction from Atty. Binamira to
oversee implementation of the project which sought to build the Ilaw
International Center (IIC) as repository of experiences and lessons on
participatory community development using child-based concerns as the entry
point in local mobilization. While construction was going on a piece of land
bought with the city government of Tagbilaran serving as mediators with
landowners to ensure lower prices, our five-member core team with UNICEF
program officer Bituin Gonzalez as adviser, proceeded to refine further the
operations and training manuals during the shift from traditional CD to the
CO-CD methodology otherwise known as the upper jaw-lower jaw approach, with the
upper jaw representing local government and the lower jaw, the local community.
More funding
resources were allocated to the “lower jaw” since it was observed that while
local governments were better organized, its supposed partner, the local community
was less so and increasingly subjected to all kinds of partisanship such as,
political, religious, clan or family affiliations. This divisiveness was
perceived as the key constraint to building community-local government
collaboration in addressing child-based and other concerns.
It was decided by
Atty. Binamira and the staff to organize IIC as independent entity separate
from those under Mrs. Marcos to avoid being the target of political forces
opposing the Marcos regime. This was easily done because IIC carried out its
fundraising activities this time without
invoking the First Lady’s name.
With the
construction of IIC completed in mid-1983, it became operational immediately
with trainees from UNICEF-assisted projects not only from the Philippines but
also abroad, such as Yemen, Bhutan and Pakistan. Other donors sent participants from their projects
to attend either orientation or skills training courses under the main module
on Appropriate Community Development (ACD) which incorporates topics on child
rights and development in all the course offerings.
These donor
agencies included World Bank with training and community immersion component
handled by IIC for the project, Central Visayas Regional Project (CVRP), which
focused on local institution building in remote areas, such as nearshore
fishing communities; upland and lowland areas; watersheds; and isolated
islands.
Other projects implemented by IIC during the period included the
following: Agro-marine and Forestry Project (USAID); Local Resource Management Project (AusAID);
Remote Island Development Project (AusAID); and a family planning project
(UNFPA).
UNICEF
support to IIC consisted of funds for training; motorcycles for the field team;
vehicles for the transport of participants from remote barangays; equipment for
monitoring and documentation. UNICEF program officers continued to be assigned
on monitoring visits to the center and its project sites and provided technical
assistance on the child welfare component fo projects implemented by other
donors. UNICEF Country Representatives Steve Umemoto and Pratima Kale gave full
support to our transition from being a high-profile community development
project of the Marcos regime to being a pioneering trainsing institution on
modified approach to community development through the IIC.
The IIC
served at this time as advocacy tool to show to policymakers and planners at
various levels how to operationalize community-government partnership
consistent with the advocacy for planning and implementing the Basic Services
Strategy promoted by the UN at that time. Prime Minister Cesar Virata was among
those who visited IIC during its early years accompanied by members of the
Cabinet. Ambassadors from the US, New Zealand and Australia also visited IIC
and were briefed on the integration of of child-based concerns in projects they
supported at that time.
The IIC
staff and UNICEF program officers went on joint field missions for the
preparatory work on the Area-Based Child Survival and Development Project
(ABCSD), which identified the most disadvantaged municipalities and cities of
the country’s eight (8) poorest provinces. Because these provinces were remote,
opposition to the martial law and the Left had a strong presence in these
areas. The child focus in our
development stragege became a handy tool
to enable us to do our community work without inviting suspicion from the
Government. Indeed our NEDA friends
joked that we came to these places to save children, but it was actually the
advocacy for child rights, welfare and survival that would shield us from the
suspicion of the military that we were working against the martial law regime.
In 1986, I
was supposed to go on a UNICEF scholarship to the US but my mother became sick
and had to stay with her in our home province in Luzon. I had to take a leave
of absence from IIC for three months. Instead of going back to Bohol, it was
suggested by my friends from UNICEF to study for a masters degree instead at
the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) so it could also help me in my career
should I decide to join the organization later. After finishing my course, I decided to go back to my old post as
Resident Director at IIC and pursued a doctorate degree in education in a a local University also under UNICEF
scholarship. My dissertations for both advanced degrees dealt with topics
related to the Ilaw ng Buhay approach to development, on how a social
preparation process could be implemented with child rights and welfare as the
key issue for mobilizing community participation and local government support.
At this
time, IIC had been part of two CPCs and most of those in our technical working
group had joined UNICEF for assignment in various countries. I was offered
several international posts with UNICEF but I could not leave IIC during its
formative years.
From April
1988 to January 1989, I was appointed concurrently as coordinator of the
NEDA-UNICEF Social Mobilization Project for Child Survival and Development
which facilitated the delivery of several
component subprojects (policy research and advocacy; community participation
and training; public information and media support; program monitoring and
evaluation) with focus on the country’s 8 poorest provinces (Maguindanao,
Negros Occidental, Ifugao, Basilan, Tawi-Tawi, and Camarines Norte) which
happened to be also areas of armed conflict. In keeping with the child focus in
these areas of conflict, we sought to save the children, but in the end we
realized that it was the concern for the child that won all parties to support
our development mission.
Integrated Atoll Development Project
In1989, after
eight years of serving as resident director of IIC, I finally got the approval
to resign and join UNICEF. Unfortunately the previous posts offered to me with were no longer available. Norma Tulio, the
program officer from Manila assigned to
the UNICEF office in Suva, Fiji, informed me about a vacancy for Participatory
Development Specialist with a UNDP-UNOPS project, the Integrated Atoll
Development Project (IADP).
The head of
the project, Jeff Liew, a Malaysian and ten years younger than I am, interviewed
me three times over the phone and, after receiving my resume and supporting
documents, appointed me to the vacant post in this new UNDP project. Of course,
the recommendation from UNICEF Manila also helped.
By March
that year, I was on my way to Suva, Fiji, the main office of UNDP South Pacific
which oversees programs and projects for South Pacific countries, most of them
in relatively isolated and small-sized atolls. It was fascinating to be told
that atolls were actually formed after the volcanoes under the Pacific Ocean erupted.
An atoll country is actually composed of small islands sharing a lagoon where
the volcano which erupted had been.
These atoll
countries where our project was mandated to do “integrated development” were Tuvalu,
Kiribati, Palau, Tokelau, Marshall Islands, Cook Islands, Federated States of
Micronesia in the South Pacific, and Maldives in the Indian Ocean. I brought to
this assignment the lessons and tools learned with UNICEF-assisted projects in
the Philippines, including with projects funded by other donors under the
auspices of the Ilaw International Center.
The mantra
“Reaching the Unreached” in the context of atoll countries assumed a different
dimension. Difficulties in bringing services to needy families were not only in
terms of geographic location. You have also to contend with tribes or clans in
conflict with one another; varying cultural and local governance practices
which define procedures in the collective ownership of land and other
resources; the existence of the chiefly system along side with democratic
institutions introduced by foreign governments, such as those of the US, Great
Britain, and France.
Our project
team, some of them UN Volunteers from the Philippines, came to know a vital
lesson from these atoll countries: the smaller the island, the more complex are
the rules. For example, you need to know where to sit during community meetings
because a specific place is assigned each family to occupy during such occasions; which door to
use to enter a house and which one to to exit; where to fish or not fish
depending on the season; a boat or canoe is the extension of one’s house and
nobody is allowed to sit on it without the owner’s permission while on the
beach and so on. All these reflect the fragility of life in small islands and,
hence, any deviation from the rules may disrupt the peaceful way of life in the
small islands.
We
put to the test what we learned from CPCs 1 & 2, about Child Focus in local
planning; social mobilization; and “walking the site,” talking to people,
“starting where the people are,” and including what we used to teach our IIC
community organizers and volunteers and the “Ilaw chapter officers, “Plan, Act,
Reflect, Act” and repeat the process all over again.
By
1993, IADP had been implemented in all the main and outer islands of all the countries
under IADP. Each one had a child-focused development plan and a list of
projects in varying stages in the approval process. As in our previous
experience in the Philippines, we learned that in practically all culture,
there is a universal concern for the child and that using such concern as
motivating factor, we could mobilize all sectors in taking the crucial steps
towards integrating efforts to tackle other urgent problems, such as poverty
and environmental degradation.
Equitable and Sustainable
Human Development Project
From 1994 to
1997, the IADP was expanded in both coverage and program content and renamed Pacific
Regional Equitable and Sustainable Human Development Project (ESHDP)
implemented by both UNDP and the United Nations Office for Project Services
(UNOPS). The project was implemented not only in the same atoll countries, but
also in several relatively bigger Pacific countries such as Fiji, Vanuatu,
Samoa and Solomon Islands. Rather than implement only social development projects,
ESHDP was mandated to promote small-scale but high-impact projects by
introducing gradually entrepreneurial elements in the projects identified for
support to disadvantaged groups, such as
youth and women.
Rather than
addressing directly the cultural constraints in promoting business activities
in predominantly subsistence and egalitarian societies, we focused on what the
youth and women were already doing in terms of enterprises and proceded to
enhance them through introduction of new technology; marketing inputs; skills training
; and encouraging the formation of cooperatives or neighborhood associations to
consolidate production and improve marketing.
ESHDP was
able to show that jobless economic growth was getting to be a trend in Pacific
countries and no amount of economic growth would be able to provide employment
to the increasing number of young people who enter the labor market each year.
In October, 1995, the project launched support to Informal Employment and
Sustainable Livelihood (IESL) and won overwhelming support
In October,
1995, the project made Palau the first participating country to adopt IESL as
its core development strategy. It put the country’s traditional food producers on center stage and refocused, in the
process, the developmental concerns of policymakers, local government
officials, as well as private sector entities, NGOs and community groups.
Through sustained information, training,
action planning and actual field demonstration activities, IESL promotion resulted
in the formal recognition of the vital role of local community groups and
individual households in food production, and in activities to conserve,
protect and enhance the environment. IESL advocacy included efforts to motivate the youth in
food production both for home consumption and to add to the family income. Trained intensively by ESHDP, national
trainers conducted state-level workshops to enable the 15 rural States and
Koror to evolve their respective action plans on IESL. The ESHDP
experience in Palau provided a template for generating policy support in all
the participating countries
Development Administration and
Participatory Planning Project
From 1997 to
2002, I served as UNDP Chief Technical Adviser to the Government of the Solomon
Islands through a project, the Solomon Islands Development Administration and
Participatory Planning Project (SIDAPP). I facilitated activities and provided
technical inputs to a counterpart government team that would eventually take
over responsibility at the Ministry of the Interior and Rural Development for
strengthening the provincial government system.
During this
period, ethnic and political differences between the capital, Honiara, and a
province, Malaita, erupted into an armed conflict. Due to the absence of a UN
office in the capital at that time, I was designated as provisional UN officer
to represent the UN System in all efforts to mediate the conflict between the
two sides. I was also assigned to provide leadership in the observance of
security rules and regulations for all UN staff and volunteers. In this role, I
served as member of the organizing committee during the negotiations between
the two sides in the conflict held under the auspices of the University of
Queensland in Brisbane.
Prior to my departure
from the Solomon Islands, our project team was able to package projects valued
at over a million US dollars to rehabilitate the schools damaged by the ethnic
conflict; provide water supply systems to coastal and island communities; and
train volunteers in community work. We were able to organize an NGO, the Rural
Development Volunteers Association (RDVA), which eventually served as partner
of Government in carrying out development initiatives in remote communities.
Within three
months after retiring from UNDP in December 2001, I was recalled back to
Solomon Islands to head an inter-agency UN committee to prepare the
post-conflict harmonization plan for all UN agencies.
Back to Bohol
– More Projects
On April,
2002, a few months after I returned to Bohol from this post-retirement assignment
in Solomon Islands, I joined the Provincial Government as Consultant on
Governance and Poverty Reduction as response to the need to improve delivery of
services to families in 17 municipalities considered as poorest. These
municipalities also happened to be areas with armed insurgency problem which
indicated the close links of poverty to the presence of strong opposition to
Government.
My initial task was to provide
technical assistance in the formulation of a common framework for poverty
reduction as guide to LGUs, provincial and national government agencies, civil
society institutions and private sector entities in a) knowing precisely who are the poor, where
they live, what services are already reaching them; b) identifying projects specifically
reaching these disadvantaged households, communities and groups; c) what
outreach mechanisms are actually reaching them or which ones can be used to
ensure that services reach them; and d)
who are the neediest among them who deserve to get assistance taking into
account limited resources.
In July 2003, I organized a team
within the planning office and recruited a VSO volunteer from England, Tony
Irving, to serve as Senior IT Expert in the design of a software to address
problems commonly met in service delivery and for LGUs to have a user-friendly pro-poor planning tool. Known as Poverty Database
and Monitoring System (PDMS), the software makes it possible to rank
municipalities, barangays, puroks and households in terms of levels of
deprivation using core poverty indicators based on the global Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs).
That same year, I founded the Bohol Local Development Foundation, Inc.
(BLDF) as partner organization of the Provincial and Local Govnment Units in
the use of tools developed by the former, including PDMS. Starting in 2004, the province
conducted PDMS household survey every three years to coincide with the term of
the new set of Muncipal and Barangay officers. In January 2004, I was appointed
head of the Bohol Provincial Poverty Reduction Management Office (BPRMO) so I could exercise formal authority in the use
of PDMS in local-level planning and service delivery with focus on those areas
heavily influenced or controlled by the armed insurgents.
PDMS was cited as one of the tools
that made it possible for the province to get out of the country’s list of 20
poorest provinces. Also, by 2007, the armed insurgency was reduced to zero as
more poor families were targeted through PDMS and received much-needed
government services. The rebels were deprived of their mass base. That same year, BLDF pioneered the application
of the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) approach first developed in
Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and promoted its use to
complement PDMS as poverty targeting tool.
Rather than consider ABCD and PDMS to
be representing mutually exclusing strategies in addressing poverty, as in the
US, Australia and other countried, we promoted both as complementary
methodologies in efforts to reach disadvantaged local communities and households. While specific target groups are identified
and the relative seriousness of their poverty needs established, their skills
and other assets are also taken into account and utilized to address
constraints brought about by poverty and severe underdevelopment.
From
March 2005 to February 2007, I was appointed Regional Program Manager for
Southeast
Asia, Habitat for Humanity International, to provide supervision and technical
support
to the staff and volunteers mostly from the Philippines who were assigned
during
the post-tsunami relief and rehabilitation operations in Bandah Aceh, Indonesia.
Subsequently,
From February 2007 to March 2009, I was assigned as Regional Program Adviser
for Habitat Southeast Asia and appointed concurrently as Interim National
Director for Habitat Malaysia.
I assumed several posts
in internationally-funded projects in Bohol after this assignment with Habitat
for Humanity International:
·
March
to July 2009 - Project Director, Community-Managed Eco-Cultural Tourism (CoMET)
Project funded by AusAID PACAP;
·
August
2009 to March, 2010 -Partnership Adviser
(Part-time), LGSP-LED (Local Governance Support Programme for Local Economic
Development) Bohol funded by the
Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) ; and
·
January
2010 to October 2013 - Project Manager, Realizing DReAMS (Development of
Resources for Access to Municipal Services)
Project, which was funded by European Union (EU), and
implemented in the Philippines, India, Bangladesh,and Bhutan in partnership with the International Council
of Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).
In
all these projects, we advocated for the use of pro-poor and child-focused community
development approaches and tools first field-tested, developed and documented mostly
with UN assistance in Bohol. During forty years of development work in a total
of 14 countries in the Asia Pacific region, I have been involved in efforts to
reach disadvantaged groups and families living in so-called poverty landscapes
with much-needed support that they may liberate themselves from the constraints
of underdevelopment.
Each
project has evolved eventually to yield lessons in linking entrepreneurship to
community development and local capacity building initiatives with focus on
child rights and welfare and improving project planning and implementatation
processes among other disadvantaged groups, such as out-of-school youth.
BLDF
involvement during the last five years has included the following:
·
Planning
and implementation of the Community-Based Shelter Assistance Project which
succeeded to demonstrate how to build 150 transition houses to move vulnerable
family members (elderly women, disabled or sick family members, children) from
insecure tents, built in the aftermath of the 7.2 magnitude earthquake which
hit the province on 15 October 2015, using public contributions and the
expertise of local carpenters;
·
Preparation
and implementation of livelihood projects under the framework of Informal Employment
and Sustainable Livelihood targeting out-of-school youth, subsistence farmers
and fisherfolks, disadvantaged women and the elderly;
·
Coalition-building
to generate local resources which led eventually to the establishment of the
first and only drug rehabilitation center in the province in response to an
urgent social need in the wake of the government-led campaign against illegal
drug use;
·
Successful
pilot-testing in a municipality, Baclayon, Bohol, a systematic and human
approach to the situation of drug surrenderees through the Database Plus
Interventions Project for Surrenderees (DIPS); and, based on this pilot
project,
·
Preparation
of a project proposal voted as number 1 in barangay polls conducted in May 2017
to determine which deserves funding support as part of the I-Budget Natin
Project, an initiative under the auspices of the Affiliated Network for Social
Accountability for East Asia and the Pacific (ANSA-EAP), the International
Center for Innovation, Transformation, and Excellence (INCITEGov), Making All
Voices Count (MAVC) and Union of Local Authorities of the Philippines (ULAP).
In
March, 2017, the BLDF Board of Trustees, most of whom were involved as Project
Compassion trainers and fieldworkers in the assessment of community development
approaches and programs in the country some 40 years ago, concluded that for
projects to be sustainable, they must include a systematic approach to values
formation among key participants in the project planning, implementation and
monitoring process, including political and informal community leaders, as well as target local communities and
households.
Now
in our late 70s, we may have run out of our lifetime limit and will have to
leave this equally painstaking and noble task to the generations that will
succeed us. ###
NMP/30 October 2019/11.31 a.m.
