Reaching the Unreached Through UN-Assisted Projects:

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.