The “Terrorism of Gossip” and the Drug Menace in Bohol

The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

A column by: NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

In recent months, newspaper headlines in Bohol have brought to prominence what has been suspected by the public all along – that the province has seemingly become a major transshipment point for illegal drugs and that drug pushers and abusers have magnified their presence quite significantly over the last few years. More alarmingly, drug syndicates are generally perceived to be operating in the province with knowledge of, if not connivance, with duly constituted authorities.

Drug-related killings and other heinous crimes, such as rape (in one case, a mother was raped by her own son, who is a drug addict); physical assault, theft and robbery. The local papers have displayed on their front pages pictures of alleged drug pushers shot dead in broad daylight, in busy streets, of Tagbilaran City and in the towns mostly by unknown assassins in motorcycles riding in tandem.

It is best to go beyond what Pope Francis refers to as the “terrorism of gossip” and confront this pernicious drug menace systematically and proceed to work out and implement a comprehensive strategy to address it.

Whether by covert police operations or by vigilantes, these killings damage the traditionally peaceful Bol-anon way of life. They do not reflect the vast reservoir of social capital and community cohesiveness that Bohol is noted for both in the country and abroad. It negates what has been vaunted about as our humane brand of life in Bohol.

Pursuing police or vigilante operations to address the current drug menace will not be effective in the long run. A multi-pronged approach is needed which may include the following:

• a comprehensive public awareness campaign aimed at enlisting people and institutions at the grassroots level in the fight against drug abuse;
• a committed police force well-equipped to combat syndicates who use illegal means and intimidation to expand their network of  drug pushers and other shady agents in every sector of society; and, equally important,
• a rehabilitation center which will combine community-based approaches with cost-effective clinical methods and a humanitarian and eclectic strategy to deal with hundreds of drug users who seem to inhabit practically all the barangays in the province whose presence threatens social stability and the attainment of peace and progress and represents a sheer waste in human resources.

It’s amazing how the drug menace confronting Boholano society has not merited broad-based support from all sectors. Instead, gossips abound on who are protecting the drug syndicates, who are pushers and users in a particular barangay or office. It is time to go beyond rumor-mongering and take the drug abuse problem by the horn, so to speak.

In my more than thirty years of helping implement programs and projects primarily for the disadvantaged and marginalized, who necessarily include women and the youth, I am convinced that the drug menace in our midst has to be addressed in a comprehensive way and specific roles assigned to individual agencies, institutions and organizations within the context of an all-embracing program approach to avoid ineffective piecemeal solutions.

For our part, with the support of our NGO, the Bohol Local Development Foundation, we will devote time and other resources to work with relevant institutions in setting up a New Day Recovery Center Bohol patterned after NDRC Davao. It is proposed that the latter consider NDRC Bohol as an affiliate and part of its corporate social responsibility. In this way, its internationally-known experts, most of them Boholanos, will reach more clients among drug abuse victims among the disadvantaged sectors of the population in their home province.

Most drug abuse victims belong to poor families who will not have the means to access quality rehabilitation procedures and tools. We have to reach them with much-needed services through a Center in the province. Towards this end, consultations are now being done with relevant academic and civil society organizations and with NDRC Davao. Hopefully, the other program components will be taken care of by the Government and other entities.

Our NGO will make available the use of a 1.2 hectare of land for this catalyst project. It is hoped this will help carry the discussion about the drug menace in Bohol beyond gossips. ###

NMP/15 January 2015/1.36 p.m. 

Beyond Economics

The Bohol Tribune
In This Our Journey

A Column by: NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS


The 2015 World Development Report of the World Bank is entitled “Mind, Society, and Behavior.” From the title itself, you can see that it will depart from the usual content of World Bank reports which are rich with economic analyses and forecasts.

This 2015 World Development Report supports the view that human beings go beyond economics, calculating costs and benefits in making decisions, but rather they behave in a way that is influenced by their own set of beliefs and assumptions, dictated by culture and institutional alliances, and that we need psychology and the social sciences to fully understand and influence positively how people think and act.

The Report notes that standard economic models  “often assume that people consider all possible costs and benefits from a self-interested perspective and then make a thoughtful and rational decision. “ This approach although useful … “  has a liability: it ignores the psychological and social influences on behavior. “

The Report further states: “Individuals are not calculating automatons.  Rather,   people are malleable and emotional actors whose decision making is influenced by contextual cues, local social networks and social norms, and shared mental models.”  All these factors determine what are perceived as desirable and possible, or “thinkable “ for themselves and their unique situation.

The Report notes that new tools have emerged based on of the “full consideration of human factors” in development policy and planning but these tools “do not displace existing policy approaches based on affecting self-interested personal incentives; rather they complement and enhance them.”

Now it can be asked:  what are the implications of the use of the new framework on development policy formulation, planning and implementation?  Indeed these approaches as a result of the mind, society and behavior framework “ do not replace standard economics, ” the Report asserts.  Rather they “enhance our understanding of the development process and the way development policies and interventions can be designed and implemented.”

Some examples of the practical application of the approaches can be cited or quoted from the Report:

Conventional financial literacy programs in low income countries have had limited effects (Xu and Zia 2012). In contrast, a recent effort in South Africa to teach financial literacy through an engaging television soap opera improved the financial choices that individuals made.

Financial messages were embedded in a soap opera about a financially reckless character. Households that watched the soap opera for two months were less likely to gamble and less likely to purchase goods through an expensive installment plan (Berg and Zia 2013).

The households felt emotionally engaged with the show’s characters, which made them more receptive to the financial messages than would be the case in standard financial literacy programs. The success of the intervention depended on “thinking socially”—our tendency to identify with and learn from others.

Note: Imagine if we can insert developmental messages in those teleseryes seen by millions not 
 only in the Philippines but in other countries where many Filipinos live and work. 

In Ethiopia, disadvantaged individuals commonly report feelings of low psychological agency, often making comments like “we have neither a dream nor an imagination” or “we live only for today” (Bernard, Dercon, and Taffesse 2011, 1).

In 2010, randomly selected households were invited to watch an hour of inspirational videos comprising four documentaries of individuals from the region telling their personal stories about how they had improved their socioeconomic position by setting goals and working hard. Six months later, the households that had watched the inspirational videos had higher total savings and had invested more in their children’s education, on average.

Surveys revealed that the videos had increased people’s aspirations and hopes, especially for
their children’s educational future (Bernard and others 2014). The study illustrates the ability of
an intervention to change a mental model—one’s belief in what is possible in the future. (Bernard and Taffesse 2014).

Note: Calling the attention of Lutgardo Labad and his cultural troops – this validates what you 
have been saying all along that cultural shows, movies and the art have a vital role to play not 
only in creating awareness but in transforming behavior. 

Based on research findings, the Report says that some of the new approaches cost very little to implement because they involve only modifying project design or implementation strategies, such as:

• changing the timing of cash transfers
• labeling something differently
• simplifying the steps for service take-up
• offering reminders
• activating a latent social norm, or
• reducing the salience of a stigmatized identity.

In the Philippines, some of these efforts to go beyond economics in development policy and planning work are not entirely new. Some projects have piloted or field-tested approaches that used to be derided by the economists who dominate planning hierarchies. It is time to go back to these small-scale initiatives and document them properly to be able to extract lessons and move on to demonstrating the role of psychology and the social sciences in macro development work.

The framework provided by the World Report can be applied and field-tested to understand better the possible constraints to be addressed in efforts to go beyond economics in the formulation of policies, plans and projects. Otherwise, the tremendous research and other technical work that have gone into producing the game-changing 2015 World Report will not do much to help reduce poverty and ensure sustainable human development in this our planet.

In Bohol, as in other provinces, the orientation of most projects is largely determined by external donors who fund them. The donors provide the templates for analysis, project preparation, implementation and evaluation. Hence, donors need to read the World Report and see how its findings and recommendations can be applied to the planning and project development processes which they support – and influence. ###

NMP/07 Jan 2014/6.46 p.m. 

First, A Record of My Own Journey

The Bohol Tribune

 In This Our Journey

A Column by: 

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

We are all in a sort of journey, from one starting point to a destination, whether such journey is planned or not. In a sense, from each other’s vantage point, we are all passers-by. We watch each other pass by and occasionally we stop to compare notes on where we are going or how the journey has been.  

Life, in a way, is made up of these journeys, each as important as the other because they contribute to our sense of direction, which paths to choose for a specific purpose. Or, we don’t choose at all, letting circumstances or emotions dictate where we want to go. Some people feel happy doing it this way.

Each destination is as good as the other in so far as it contributes to our sense of well-being, as long as it does not harm anyone and, better still, if it amounts to something good for all or to a significant number of people.

This column seeks to track such journeys, whether in my own life or in others, fellow passers-by in the search for something to love, to believe in, to fight for or simply to marvel at in this our still-expanding universe of 17 billion planets.

Let me, then, start with my own journey –

Journeys, actually, but let us just choose one, which is the main one, the path taken that led me to Bohol 33 years ago. I have done countless self-assessments and group meditations, retreats, confessions and diary keeping or journal writing for the most part of my 72 years and by now I am convinced that a traumatic experience when I was fourteen years old led me to take the development path I have taken.

My father died at 23 years of age when I was only three years old. I grew up in a family of women consisting of my maternal grandmother, mother and a younger sister.  When I had problems, like being bullied in school, I would visit the grave of my father and there I would tell him everything.  But one day, when I went to the cemetery to complain that I could not buy Babe Ruth chocolate during recess, I found his grave was gone. In its place was the ornate tomb of a rich Chinese businessman  complete with huge candles, flowers and baskets, some still with apples and other fruits.

I rushed to the factory where mother was working and asked her where my father’s grave was transferred and she said that if some years elapsed and we failed to pay the annual fee of Php 50, then the administrator of the Catholic cemetery could just take away the bones and give the space to another family.

I went to look for the parish priest and found him asleep and I was told he could not be disturbed in his siesta.  In frustration and disgust, I unzipped my short pants and urinated all over the balcony and vowed I would never go back to church again. During that week, I resigned as auxiliary member of the Legion of Mary.  It took me years to get back to the faith.

This traumatic experience colored my perception of the world I was growing up in and through the years, I used it to explain my bias in working with projects among the poor and marginalized. In the late 1970s, I worked with UNICEF-assisted projects in the eight provinces considered as the country’s poorest.  From 1982 to 1989, I worked with the pioneers of community development to establish the Ilaw International Center in Bohol which served to field-test and document innovative approaches to improving service delivery to remote communities. In the 1990s, I served in various UNDP projects in underserved atoll countries in the Pacific and had the chance to work in Maldives, in the Indian Ocean.

Three months after retiring from UNDP, in April 2002, I joined the Provincial Government of Bohol as volunteer consultant to be part of a team at the Provincial Planning and Development Office (PPDO) with the mission to help get the province out of the list of top 20 poorest provinces.  The following year, I founded the Bohol Local Development Foundation to serve as partner of the PPDO in developing the Provincial Database and Monitoring System (PDMS) which served as tool to identify the poorest households based on core poverty indicators and achieve more effective targeting of service delivery to them. From Bohol, the pro-poor targeting tool has been brought to several cities and municipalities in the country as well as in other countries, namely, India, Bangladesh and Bhutan.

In recent years, PDMS has been used by local government units in combination with other tools and approaches such as in the promotion of asset-based community development, gender balance in project planning and implementation, eco-budgeting, as well as medium, small and micro enterprises (MSMEs). We have put all information about this pro-poor targeting tool and its possible applications in a website www.pdmsplus.com  for those interested that the real poor in a particular purok, barangay and municipality can be identified properly sans political interventions and reached with adequate information and services.

This is the journey I have taken for the most part of a lifetime conditioned by a traumatic experience I had while growing up in my hometown in Quezon province. In efforts to achieve clarity of targets and goals for my own development journey, I am in a sense looking for the bones of my father in remote places and among both the downtrodden and those who profess to serve them .

Such is the way I will view  similar journeys taken by fellow passers-by in our common quest for meaning and commitment in an increasingly complicated and hostile world. Join me, then, in this our journey. ###

NMP/06 Jan 2015/11.10 p.m. 

How to address the drug abuse problem in Bohol : A Proposal

BLDF proposes that the project have two phases:

Phase 1: the establishment of the physical infrastructure and the recruitment/appointment of appropriate staff for the the Center; and

Phase 2: the start-up operations of the Center taking into account the need to reach as many drug abuse victims as possible so as to create impact in the overall situation.

The objective for Phase 1 is to establish the Center with the required facilities and staffing. Phase 2 will aim for the full operations of the Center, reaching target clientele among the poor and disadvantaged families, while ensuring sustainability for the center.

BLDF seeks to be part of these two phases of the project and participate towards sustainable operations starting on Phase 3 after a comprehensive assessment of  the previous two phases.

Strategy

It is proposed that NDRC Davao, which is a noted rehabilitation and psychological services facility with a pool of medical experts in the field and an international network of similar institutions, considers NDRC Bohol as an affiliate and part of its corporate social responsibility, In this way, NDRC Davao will be able to expand its outreach to clients who belong to the relatively disadvantaged sectors of the population.

BLDF will make available the use of a piece of land in Baclayon appropriate for the facility patterned after BDRC Davao. Its network of development experts and volunteers, starting from the predecessor UNICEF-assisted Ilaw International Center, will be made available in terms of related areas such as poverty reduction and sustainable development, as well as expertise in undertaking advocacy and fund raising campaign in support of the proposed Phase 1 in the establishment of the center.

Once this is approved, BLDF will organize formally a Secretariat for the fund-raising activities taking into account the need to design the infrastructure to be put on the donated land. The design will be the basis for infrastructure cost will be part of determining the target for the fund raising campaign.

BLDF will organize a Technical Working Group from among interested stakeholders of the project, namely, Holy Name University, which has a Psychology Department; a consortium of faith-based organizations keen on development issues; and a cluster of Local Government Units (LGUs) within the catchment area of the facility; private sector entities in Tagbilaran City and the municipalities who have expressed concern about the drug menace in the province and are willing to help put up a relevant rehabilitation facility.

While the fund-raising and infrastructure building activities are on-going, the Technical Working Group will proceed with the recruitment and training of the core staff in coordination with NDRC Davao.

Key Activities

The preparatory activities will include the following:

 Consult with NDRC Director and/or NDRC Davao on how to proceed with the proposed project.

 Revise the draft Project Concept as appropriate.

 Organize a project core team to review the concept prior to discussing the revised project concept with NDRC Davao.

 Show the project core team the proposed site to be donated as site of NDRC Bohol.

 Have the architect visit the proposed site in Bohol.

 Have the architect visit NDRC Davao for his orientation on the design of the facility

 Make the architect prepare a design and costing for the proposed facility.

 Organize a Technical Working Group to work on the program of the Center and the required
        staffing.

 Prepare the costing in running the Center for one year.

 Prepare an Advocacy and Fund Raising Campaign for NDRC Bohol with advice from NDRC  
        Davao.

 Conduct a joint meeting of the Secretariat with the NDRC Davao on the draft work plan to be
        prepared.

NDRC Davao will provide advice in the planning and implementation of Phases 1 & 2 of the project.

BLDF will assume the responsibility of organizing the Secretariat and the other relevant committees for the implementation of Phases 1 and 2. It will initially form a core team to liaise with NDRC Davao in the formulation of the work plan for Advocacy and Fund Raising.

Note: BLDF invites comments or feedbacks to this proposal.

Nestor M. Pestelos 
President, Bohol Local Development Foundation, Inc.
NMP/24 Dec 2014/8.14 p.m. 

Need to address the drug menace in Bohol

In recent months, newspaper headlines in Tagbilaran City and the province of Bohol brought to prominence what has been suspected by the public all along – that the province has seemingly become a major transshipment point for illegal drugs and that drug pushers and abusers have increased quite significantly over the last few years. More alarmingly, drug syndicates are generally perceived to be operating in the province with knowledge of, if not connivance, with duly constituted authorities.

Drug-related killings and other heinous crimes, such as rape (in one case, a mother was raped by her own son who is a drug addict); physical assault, theft and robbery. More than a dozen drug pushers have been reportedly shot dead in broad daylight, in busy streets, of Tagbilaran City and in the towns by unknown assassins in motorcyles riding in tandem.

Whether by covert police operations or by vigilantes, these killings damage the traditionally peaceful Bol-anon way of life. They do not reflect the vast reservoir of social capital and community cohesiveness that Bohol is noted for both in te country and abroad. It negates what has been vaunted about as our brand of life in Bohol.

Pursuing this as key strategy to address the current drug menace will not be effective. A multi-pronged approach is needed which may include the following:

-a comprehensive public awareness campaign aimed at enlisting people and institutions at the grassroots level in the fight against drug abuse;

-a committed police force well-equipped to combat syndicates who use illegal means and intimidation to expand their network of  drug pushers and other shady agents in every sector of society; and, equally important,

-a rehabilitation center which will combine community-based approaches with cost-effective clinical methods and a humanitarian and eclectic strategy to deal with hundreds of drug users who seem to inhabit practically all the barangays in the province whose presence threatens social stability and the attainment of peace and progress and represents a sheer waste in human resources.

Bohol Local Development Foundation, Inc. (BLDF) and its predecessor organization, the UNICEF-assisted Ilaw International Center (IIC), have a combined experience of more than thirty years in efforts to address poverty in ways that enhance partnership with local communities and institutions. More recently, it has shifted its program focus from implementing a community-based shelter assistance project for families rendered homeless by the magnitude 7.2 earthquake in the province to the promotion of informal employment and sustainable livelihood among the youth, particularly those who are out of school or those in Alternative Learning Systems (ALS).

In less than a year of implementing projects for the out-of-school youth, BLDF has become convinced that it cannot ignore the drug abuse problem which is causing deaths and injuries to a growing number of people and negating in the process, the gains made in previous years in development planning and implementation.

BLDF seeks to be part of the evolving plans and programs to combat a growing menace in society. Otherwise, the achievements in combatting poverty and ensuring sustainable development in the province will be for naught.

More next post. 

Memoirs of an Old Warrior or Development Worker?

7.28 a.m. Mil Sevilla-Reyes, our former high school classmate and close friend, has assured us she is on track for the release of the 2nd edition of the book by the first quarter of 2015. She has actually taken a big chunk of the work regarding this edition, which is being made possible by a donation from Mrs. Corazon Verzosa-Lanuza, her former student at our Alma Mater, the Quezon Provincial High School in Lucena City. As announced before, this edition will have Part 2 which will deal with our experience in implementing a pilot project for families made homeless by the earthquake which hit Bohol on 15 Oct 2013.

The donor and Mil, along with some other alumni,agree that the two-part edition can motivate the high school students to appreciate poetry and development while still at the secondary school. Since Mil was for many years an English teacher here and abroad, she knows precisely how the book can achieve this objective. Due to the bulk of work she has been doing for this book, I have proposed to her and the team that she should be considered a co-author rather than solely editor of this edition.

I hope to help her out more significantly during this time prior to publication. The house build project our Foundation has achieved its objective of piloting a community-based approach to providing shelter assistance to families rendered homeless by the 15 Oct 2013 earthquake.

My close friends have advised me to take a break from active development work not only to preserve my health but also, some say, my sanity, by limiting myself to giving advice to young people rather than do the field work myself. A sensible advice, actually, except that these young people are too much in a hurry and do not have the patience in working with people at the periphery.

Indeed it will be quite challenging to work with young people in projects that can put to good use their gadgets and expertise in social media in the service of pro-poor development. But, perhaps,
at age 72, I may not have the stamina and the mental alertness of someone at age 27 to understand how these new technologies work to achieve cost-effectiveness and efficiency in projects. As everyone suspects, as our young consultant Emily Pedersen and the equally young overseas volunteers, Marit Meijer, Arno Djikstra and Annelies van der Maas, seem to validate, I am good in talking and can give all the priests and pastors we work with a good run for their Sunday collections, but I may not have the goodies to understand all the tools of the digital age.

Hence, my close friends from college and the post-college Bohemian and later, activist era, have suggested that I write the magnum opus I have been threatening to write during the past ten years or so. They suggested as title, "Memoirs of an Old Warrior." Well, OK, I am game to this suggestion. I suspect this is related to this gift of mobile recorder from my friend Hilmy from the Maldives.

All my close friends after high school seem to arrive at a consensus that I it would be good, if I talk to a voice recorder, rather than to them, so that I can spare their eardrums and the same time, come up with a book of lessons or what-not and perhaps help create in the process, generations of committed development workers - if ever they can forget their gadgets for thirty minutes and thirty-five seconds a day to read an Old Man's tall tales!

Good idea, actually, something to chew on when I am not talking. But first thing first: Mil Sevilla-Reyes and the team should finish first the second edition of the Old Warrior and Other Poems. Otherwise, we do not something to link up with to justify the new book.

Group to train OSY, ALS students become employable

• Features
• Education

by Oliver Samson - December 14, 2014 BUSINESSMIRROR

0 2

THE volunteer group that helped over 100 families of earthquake survivors in Bohol rebuild their homes will train 1,150 out-of-school youth (OSY) and students in the province starting early 2015.

The group is planning to give a training on employability to the young people from communities devastated by the 7.2-magnitude earthquake that intensely shook the island in October last year, said Nestor Pestelos, Bohol Local Development Foundation (BLDF) president.

“We will pilot two projects,” he said. “One, the Youth Skills Project on refrigeration in partnership with a local air-conditioning shop. The other, the Bikes for Rent Project in the municipality of Baclayon.”

The trainings are part of the initial venture of the foundation’s “Informal Employment and Sustainable Livelihood Project (IESLP)” for communities devastated by the earthquake, seeking to provide OSY and Alternative Learning System (ALS) students with “employable skills,” Pestelos said.

A maximum of 100 OSY and ALS students can be trained every month, starting February on refrigeration, tour guiding, bicycle maintenance and repair, managing souvenir shops, and selling of bicycle spare parts, he said. “This is new in Bohol,” Pestelos said. “Baclayon will be a place where out-of-school youth and ALS students can learn and establish their own bicycles-for-rent project and later, a repair shop.”

BLDF sees informal employment and sustainable livelihood are required among communities severely damaged by the earthquake, as well as those outside the calamity zone to help “address current development problems” in the area, he said. Based on the experiences of small-island economies, IESLP generates effects that provide “community groups and individual households” with systematic support to “food production” and other undertakings, like environment conservation and protection, Pestelos said.

The project has a capacity to “increase family income and build both economic and social capital” to address poverty and social problems accompanying it, like theft, drug addiction and other crimes, he said.

More skills training will follow refrigeration and bicycle repair and maintenance workshops. Future projects of the volunteer group in communities hit by earthquake in Bohol under IESLP include small-scale food production for home consumption, family-based production and marketing of rice, corn, fish, poultry swine and handicrafts, Pestelos said.

The central focus of the project is stepping up informal economic activities at community and home levels to the effect of increasing household income, he said. This way, they help address their own problems around prior and after the earthquake, Pestelos noted.

After “employable skills” and livelihood trainings, the OSY and their ALS student counterparts will be deployed in different sustainable livelihood projects.

Proposed projects under BLDF’s informal employment and sustainable livelihood program include organic-rice growing, eco-tourism, banana production and processing, organic-hog raising, handicraft-making, tour guiding, refrigeration and peanut farming, Pestelos said.

Through the assistance of government and private sector, BLDF will brace its project with “relevant policy measures, financial inputs, improvement of processes, sound linkage to markets, and better institutional arrangements” to ensure if that works.

This will intensify production and broaden the market, improving profitability easing poverty and conserving and environment in effect, Pestelos said. The foundation is seeking to provide a total of 1,150 OSY and ALS students from the communities in Bohol before the end of 2015 with employable skills and livelihood trainings, he said. “We can increase the number depending on the projects that can be provided with support through our fund campaign,” Pestelos said.

Back Again to Blogging

Here we are again, five months after my last blog as DevWorker. Urgent matters kept us away. The magnitude 7.2 earthquake 15 October last year has kept us busy with a lot of things: distributing relief goods sent by friends; organizing a fund drive to help those made homeless by the quake; monitoring the house build in target barangays of two municipalities, Calape and Antequera; attending meetings organized by the government and international donors; promoting the planting of dwarf coconut trees among the quake victims as short-term source of cash and long-term strategy for livelihood; serving as tour guide to supporters of Bohol Quake Assistance Fund Drive, an initiative of BLDF in partnership with Miriam College and Peacock Garden, a world-class resort here in Baclayon, Bohol.

Prior to the quake, we had been going through a rather grim assessment of what our development efforts of the past 40 years amounted to. It's more than half of a lifetime of work with development agencies and NGOs and we are faced with the reality that we are meeting the same set of problems in our work, most notable of which is the lack of sustained interest on the part of individuals and organizations we work with at local levels. I realized we spent more time in donor-assisted capacity-building activities than in  providing real "hardware" support to community initiatives.

There seemed to be no end to consultations, orientation, seminars and workshops paid for by external donors than with activities designed to find out more about existing local initiatives and seeking ways and means to enhance them. The result is that we become more of a burden to local governments and communities by robbing them of precious time to look at their concrete situation and helping them improve what they are really doing. Most of the so-called capacity-building activities are based on modules field-tested some place without bearing to local conditions. Hence, the locals are not better off with new practical knowledge to improve what they do. They are instead loaded with new acronyms which are difficult for them to remember and are not useful in helping improve the planning and implementation of projects.

The participatory development concepts and processes that we have subscribed to in decades of work with local governments and communities are generally not subscribed to in the planning, implementation and monitoring of projects. Everything seems to depend on what the higher level of authority says. No striving at all for project officers to understand the local situation and how projects can be made more relevant to it. Worst, if you are an NGO implementing a project, you become an extension of government in building an authority-centered approach as opposed to the participatory approach.

Again, I might be wrong in this perception, but it tortured me for quite some time. Then the earthquake happened. Somehow this natural disaster shook us from the comfort of just looking back and comparing whtat happened in the past to what we saw as trends in present-day development work. We stopped blogging for fear we might infect readers with our negative thoughts and the depression which seemed to have set in.

The extent of the devastation and the need to act provided us a basis for trying out the relevance of the old participatory approach to the current situation. Indeed back to action.

Indeed back to blogging, too.

The Impact of Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda on Bohol Quake Assistance (BQA)

The impact of super typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda was not as severe in Bohol as in the provinces of Leyte and Samar, but nonetheless it has affected the operations of the Bohol Local Development Foundation (BLDF), the NGO which has been supporting the victims of last month’s earthquake: 

 

·    Four municipalities (Inabanga, Getafe, Talibon and Bien Unido) in Northern Bohol were severely 

    damaged. There are now more homeless people in these areas because of Typhoon Haiyan.

 

·    From a target of 150 houses in a six-month period, we have to double or even triple our         

   target to be able to cope with families who have their houses destroyed by the super typhoon.

 

·  The super typhoon destroyed completely the geothermal power source in Leyte which is the 

  same source for Bohol. It will take months before the Leyte facility will be fully operational. 

  Meanwhile, water and power supply is adversely affected in Bohol which will impact negatively 

  on existing plans for rehabilitation. 

 

·  The super typhoon caused massive landslides in Antequera and Cortes which will affect the 

  time frame for implementing existing plan to move families from tents and other makeshift 

  structure.

 

·  The landslides further reduce the possibility of moving families to their former location. We 

  need to spend time and look for resources to be able to procure land suitable for relocating 

  families in safer location. 

 

Nestor M Pestelos

BLDF President

Letter of Appeal for Bohol

07 November 2013

To Our Dear Friends,

As you are aware, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck our country’s Region VII on

15 October 2013, causing serious damage mostly in Bohol. Over 200 people died, more than 1,000 got injured and majority of the 1.26 million population were severely affected by the

natural catastrophe.

You must have seen media images showing how in a matter of seconds, a total of 22 centuries-old churches were damaged, some reduced to rubbles;  hundreds of buildings and homes destroyed;  roads and bridges blocked or collapsed; power lines cut and water supplies interrupted.

Some of the world-famous Chocolate Hills were defaced. The damage to the local economy and to the people’s sense of security and well-being was incalculable.  A total of 2,737 aftershocks have been recorded to date. More than 100 sinkholes were discovered. A state of calamity has been declared for the province.

Around 380,000 people have been displaced with over 75,000 living in makeshift shelters outside their homes and in open public places or evacuation centers. A total of 56,993 houses were damaged, 12, 503 or 22% of which were totally destroyed.

Our NGO, the Bohol Local Development Foundation (BLDF), has joined hands with Habitat for Humanity Philippines, Miriam College and Peacock Garden Spa and Resort in Baclayon, Bohol to help the Government and the international committee address the challenge to provide temporary houses and enable families to move from tents and other makeshift evacuation sites. Based on current estimates, each temporary house will cost Php 10,000 (USD 230) with contribution of labor and some construction materials from the family being helped.

The target of this partnership is to help families with totally damaged houses by building 150 houses from the initial period, October 2013 to April 2014. Administrative costs, estimated at 15% of the house costs (Php 1.5 m.) will amount to Php 225,000. Hence, the total funding required is Php 1,725, 000, the target for the funding campaign.  

We will increase the house build targets as we raise more funds.

 We appeal to you to help us raise this amount by sending your contribution to:  United Coconut Planters Bank, Tagbilaran City, Philippines with BLDF UCPB Peso Acct # 003051275898; UCPB SWIFT CODE – UCPBPHMMA .

Alternatively, your cash donation can be sent to: Western Union c/o Ms. Bona Dea Padron  Address: La Paz, Cortes, Bohol; Tel. +63 38 503 9440; Mobile: +63 908 860 1018; Palawan Pawnshop, Cebuana Lhullier, M. Lhullier c/o Lorena Balala, Laya, Baclayon, Bohol; Tel. +63 (935) 3635241.

Contributions will be acknowledged on the FB page, Bohol Quake Assistance. Financial and program updates are also published on this FB page. My FB name is npestelos. Information about BLDF is found in these websites: www.nestormpestelos.blogspot.com and www.pdmsplus.com.

Any amount will do. The important thing is for us to show we care for Bohol and its gentle people who are now living through difficult times. 

Yours sincerely,

NESTOR M. PESTELOS

BLDF President

Happiness Project

Last 31 August, I bought a book from the local NBS entitled The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. Due to the usual crowded days and equally crowded nights, I have read only a few pages, 46 to be exact. From this number of pages, I read some startling things that set me into thinking whether it would be great to devote a year to pursue things that would make me happy - or, to bae precise, to be more happy since in most times, I am happy.

The blurb on the back cover says: "She found that money can buy happiness, when spent wisely; that novelty and challenge are powerful sources of happiness; that outer order contributes to inner calm; that the very smallest of changes can make the biggest differences."

This, plus the 70% reduction from the usual price, got me into buying the book.

After 40 pages, what can I say about the book? I think it's worth reading until the end. She writes in a very lucid and simple style. I was also drawn to the promise that I could learn some lessons to get me out of this rather awkward situation I have found myself in, something difficult to describe to my wife and other close relations, this feeling of being lost amidst all this frenzy around me.

During the past three months or so, I keep worrying about the pain on my left knee, but I have not taken the time and trouble to see a doctor. I would rather suffer than work out the less painful job of adjusting my schedule and see the doctor. I have resorted to taking painkillers to ease the pain, rather than to go to the doctor and get a proper diagnosis and, hopefully, a solution to what ails me.

This wavering attitude about going to the doctor is making me unhappy but I do not do anything about it. To be fair to myself, I have really been so busy with a lot of things. I have been to several provinces on a consultancy assignment and the frantic schedule to meet deadlines somehow distract my attention from the pain. This is crazy thought and I am not being reasonable or, if you please, logical about it all.

I must follow Ms. Rubin's example of writing down a plan for my own Happiness Project. Perhaps I should start listing what make me unhappy. Or, like her, I should have some resolutions as I plod through the routine of each day hoping to be happy with each resolution carried out.

It's quite a task clarifying what I really want to do in this Happiness Project.

Perhaps the first thing to do is to get a good night's sleep, good for the mandatory eight hours, and clear my brain of cobwebs that prevent me from seeing the true path to happiness.

It's 2.35 a.m., quite from 9.00 p.m., which is my sleeping time.

Now to bed and worry about the H Project later. Must resume reading the book one of these days and resolve to finish reading it.

Now I must force myself to sleep.

Project Ideas

During the past three weeks or so, I have been in the company of friends trying to find new project ideas which we can reflect on and if we have the time, probably convert into full-blown project documents or proposals for submission to government or external donors.

Some of these ideas are as follows:

• Establishing a Center for Agribusiness and Community Development or, perhaps, converting the present Center for Agriculture and Sustainable Agriculture into one. This will focus community development in the agriculture sector in making farmers entrepreneurs. Three kinds of courses can be developed: an orientation course to introduce farmers to have an idea of how agribusiness can benefit them as and their families; a certificate course for out-of-school youth to enable them to appreciate agribusiness and prepare them for engagement in agricultural enterprises; and a diploma or undergraduate course on agribusiness.
• An  action research on the current distribution of poverty reduction projects, their coverage in terms of localities and households; the services rendered; and an assessment of their effectiveness in providing services and/or providing livelihood assistance to the poorest of the poor. 
• Establishing an ABCD (Asset Based Community Development) Institute either as stand-alone institution as private sector initiative or an undertaking between the provincial government and other stakeholders. It can also be hosted by one of the academic institution. The Institute can serve as hub for PO, NGOs and LGUs involved in projects using the ABCD approach. If successful, the Institute can open its doors to course participants outside Bohol from projects which can benefit from the unique approach. 
• Conduct of case studies on the unique experiences of carrying out the ABCD approach. 
• An inventory of outstanding local initiatives such as the 17-hectare farm of Bern Karaan of Bilar which applies a unique technology to grow cacao, coconut and bananas. Case studies on these initiatives can provide valuable materials for teaching business and agriculture. 
• A study of NGOs and see what have changed in their orientation and what is regarded as their future as perceived by current leaders. 
• Application of new technologies to solve the water problem in small islands. Hilmy, our guest from Maldives discussed with the people from Pamilacan how a simple technology in South Asia has solved the problem of water scarcity.
• In-depth study of microfinance projects in the province to compare experiences and involve stakeholders in an assessment activity to find gather specific experiences for analysis on what work and what don't work in these projects.

These ideas can be given more details in the coming days to fully develop them as project proposal which can be submitted to national and regional agencies and external donors for support.  The Provincial Government can also take the lead in further studying the project ideas and assigning a task force to develop each project idea found feasible and with potential for support by LGUs and the local communities.

Still About Working with Donors

Aside from promoting the cause for democracy and reforms under difficult times, donors are actually better known for supporting initiatives that may still be outside the immediate concern of government. It takes quite a bit of time for government to initiate pioneering efforts. Most of the time, external donors come up with innovative ideas and sell these to government as pilot projects, to test their possible suitability to local-level planning and implementation. In some rare instances, it can be the other way round, the government having some concept that requires foreign funding to transform into a pilot project.

Let me list here those projects I have been involved in that without donor support might not have seen the light of day because local governments were still too short-sighted to appreciate their possible significance and impact:

-Local Resource Management Project. Funded by USAID in the late 70s and implemented in several provinces. A systematic approach was undertaken to find out what local resources existed in a locality and how community groups could be assisted to turn these into livelihood. As early at that time, there was the concern about how to link local production to market. Good experience. Sometimes our NGO ended up buying the brooms that women groups in Virac made because they could not be sold in Catanduanes. Our training director, Ike Tolentino, would bring hundreds of these brooms to Manila to sell them to office mates and in neighboring establishments.

-Child Survival and Development Project. Funded by UNICEF in the early 80s. For the first time, a project focused on the poorest provinces. The project was carried out in 8 poorest provinces in the country. The project was able to make the technical staff appreciate the relationship between poverty and armed insurgency while exerting efforts to make child-based services available to remote villages.

-Agro-Marine Project. Funded by USAID in the 80s. It demonstrated that interventions are needed both in the uplands and in lowlands and coastal areas to be able to create impact in environmental interventions.

-Remote Islands Development Project. Funded by USAID in the 80s. It drew attention to the development needs of the 50 or so small islands around the main island of Bohol. LGUs and NGOs
were able to appreciate the constraints met in making delivery of services more systematic to these outer islands.

-Peace and Development Project. Funded by EU for several provinces in Mindanao torn by conflict. Implemented by Habitat for Humanity Philippines in 2007. The project involved the integration of Muslim returnees in predominantly Christian villages facilitated through participatory local planning with the use of the Poverty Database Monitoring System (PDMS) survey methodology and software.

Outside the country, we were involved in donor-assisted projects which were equally innovative as those in the Philippines:

-Integrated Atoll Development Project.  Funded by UNDP and executed through UNOPS. Implemented in 8 atoll countries in the South Pacific and in the Maldives from 1989 to 1995. For the first time, the specific needs of small atoll countries were systematically addressed.

-Equitable and Sustainable Human Development Project. Funded by UNDP and executed through UNOPS. Implemented in the rest of the Pacific countries from 1996 to 2001 with focus on providing livelihood support to the most disadvantaged sectors of the population such as women and those who lived in remote villages.

-Solomon Islands Development Administration and Participatory Planning Project . Funded by UNDP and executed through UNOPS. Imelemented in the Solomon Islands from 1997 to 2001. The project sought to enhance local government capacities in carrying out participatory planning and project development with focus on the involvement of disadvantaged groups.

These innovative projects would not have been possible without the technical and funding support of external donors.

More About Working With Donors

To balance the negative impression which may have been created by my previous post, I will now deal with the good points of working with external donors.

First, during the Martial Law regime in the 70s, it was the donors and the projects they assisted which carried the banner for democracy and reforms. Community meetings were banned; in fact, a group of three gathering for a meeting or informal chat was considered illegal. This martial decree was generally observed throughout the country. Everyone was afraid to be arrested and thrown in jail without warrant of arrest

UNICEF was unfazed. It encouraged the LGUs and NGOs in its various projects to organize planning meetings using its mandated child focus to local development. The donor demonstrated that the child-based concerns were beyond politics, that whatever the political situation, the plans and programs for children should continue. Later, UNICEF was blamed for the leak to the media of a photo of a malnourished child during the famine in Negros that the dictatorship would like to hide. Nothing came out of it because nobody could prove it was the donor who instigated the bad publicity.

During the martial law years, UNICEF was operating globally under its development thrust labelled as basic services strategy, which emphasized the importance of popular participation in child-based development. Although I was in some sort of rehabilitation program on account of my involvement in anti-Marcos protest, UNICEF dealt with me while I was assigned with restricted movement at the Green Revolution office at the Nayong Pilipino. In more than one occasion, the donor recommended to the Government that I should be sent on study tour abroad as part of my task in looking into the participatory aspect of UNICEF-supported programs. The Government did not approve the recommendation for fear that I would not return and worst, I might make some noise about the martial law regime.

Finally, when I was allowed to live outside the confines of the Green Revolution, UNICEF provided me grants to pursue further studies at the University of Bradford in England and the Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development. UNICEF supported the piloting and eventual replication of the Ilaw ng Buhay (Light of Life) Program as an innovative approach to community development.

While our group of community development workers raised funds for the physical infrastructure, UNICEF provided logistic and funding support to curriculum building and the piloting of innovative training approaches at the Ilaw International Center (IIC) established in barangay Bool, Tagbilaran City in 1983. The IIC, on account of its "Ilaw ng Buhay" approach to development, which featured partnership between local government and organized communities, was able to implement replication of the approach not only in some provinces in the Philippines, but also in other countries by training participants from Yemen and Indonesia.

Our involvement in UNICEF-assisted programs during the martial law regime brought us in close contact with other donors supporting programs advocating participatory strategies at a time when they were not encouraged by the Government. We can credit donors for their support to people-based development during the repressive regime in the Philippines.

More next post

Working with Donors

First, I would like to say most of the projects I have been involved in during the last forty years or so are funded by external donors.

I am often asked what have been the lessons learned from this experience of working in donor-funded projects. Well, my stock answer has always been the same: it often takes the patience of a mule to manage or implement externally-funded project. A positive spin can be that donor-funded projects can teach us to be patient and tolerant and flexible in dealing with all sorts of characters we meet at various stages of a project.

You will agree these are virtues one needs to cope with life, most especially in difficult circumstances. Which is to say it's a little bit more difficult to be part of a donor-funded project than a project that relies solely on local funding for support.

Let me show some examples:

-In the late 70s, I held the record for the most number of times to revise a project proposal. If I recall correctly, I had to revise it 20 times. One reason was that there were just too many experts looking at my masterpiece. I had to revise the document each time a consultant from either the Government or the donor reviewed it. The other reason was, according to a friend from the donor agency, I kept forgetting to put in the child focus. She said jokingly: "You must put the child every fifth sentence in your proposal." That's the moral - you must always be guided by the donor's mandate or bias. Forgetting this basic thing will mean you are in for a rough ride starting at the planning stage.

-Sometimes the price of success in donor-assisted projects is to give up your peaceful and quiet life. Donors would arrange visits to your project both from foreign and in-country projects or offices. Sometimes you wonder when will you have time to implement the activities of your own project.

-More often than not, your life gets complicated when your Government and the donor agency do not see eye to eye on certain project matters. You are caught in a tug-of-war between the two which can take months to unravel. I have experienced this a number of times both as a project adviser operating under Government mandate and as a consultant representing the donor's interest. In some cases, it is no longer the technical issue that is difficult to resolve, but how to save the face (or preserve the self-esteem) of the persons you are dealing with in the stand-off.

-It may happen that the conflict is between two donor agencies that support your project. Things can get so petty that you wonder whether you are still in college involved in some kind of fraternity rivalries. I had the experience of being told that I was not doing my duty just because I happened to position the official vehicle with the door displaying the other donor agency's logo!

-I have worked in a project where the donor seemed not to trust anybody from the projecr or the Government, whether it is about technical or funding matter. Staff from the donor agency will arrive in the morning by plane from Manila and leave in the afternoon to fulfill tasks which can be assigned to local counterparts, e.g. giving an overview of the workshop; introducing the participants; announcing each session; and doing a wrap-up of the activity.

-Too much centralization is still present mong some donor agencies perhaps of some sad experiences in the past, but there should a healthier outlook regarding relationships with project staff. In finances, the same donor insists on paying everything from the central office, including for the cartolina used in training. The same donor required that a copy of the marriage certificate of the hotel owners be provided before the processing of payment to show a document supporting the joint bank account where the payment will be deposited.

-The other extreme can also happen. The donor is virtually non-existent during the first or two years of a project, not issuing any guidelines, and it only appears when the project is about to end. Naturally, there will be problems created by this laissez fair approach. Then when the blame game starts, you will expect this type of donor to quickly pass the blame to the locals of course.

The foregoing are some of the things which can complicate your life in donor-assisted projects. I often find myself wishing that we go back to just working out projects on our own, utilizing local resources, and not complicating our lives and those of the people we try to help.

But this may be too simplistic a solution. The other way is for donors and their counterparts to have an honest appraisal of what they do and do not do together under the overarching theme of poverty reduction and sustainable development.

Just a reflection.

Working with Local Government

Now that I am thinking of retiring from active project work, something which I have been engaged in for more than 40 years both in my country and abroad, perhaps it is time to pause and reflect on some lessons in the hope that these can somehow be useful to anybody thinking about a career in development work. Or somehow ease the emotional burden I carry since I have been thinking during the past few days that such engagement did not really amount to anything quite different from the experience of previous development workers or prefessionals.Nothing qualitatively different from what other project implementors, consultants or volunteers have experienced about working with government or local government units, in particular.

I will try to talk about these lessons as actually advice to those who will be in projects involving local governments -

First, be prepared to be creative in dealing with political leaders. They share a common idea to be seen as doing something good for their constituency. This is a fact to be accepted rather than serve as source of cynicism about the political influence in decision-making regarding service delivery at local level. There will always be political interference, but you need not be afraid to face this fact and do a good job of explaining the project, its purpose and methodology, and sell the idea to the politicians it will be good for them to be perceived as having technical criteria in the provision of services to the people. Project resources will always be short of demand and the sooner they understand that prioritizing beneficiaries based on relative levels of deprivation, the better it will be for their image.

Second, right from the start of the project, show respect for local people and their leaders and reject all efforts of government agencies from higher levels or donors to short-cut the process by immediately plunging into the business of distributing largesse to the people to help local governments win some political points.
Be good at making local communities and their leaders feel they are really the ones making the decision, not the project, on matters such as selecting individuals or households who will receive priority assistance.

Third, it will be good to get broad-based support from civil society institutions as leverage in dealing with local governments. Be good at social mobilization work without being an added burden to local project stakeholders. Respect authority of ideas as against authority of command. More likely than not, political leaders and the government officers under their jurisdiction will substitute authority to technical criteria or information as basis for decisions involving your project. It can be discouraging and frustrating at times, but we are development workers and must persevere in the vital task to win people by ideas. Educate political leaders without lecturing them but by the sheer power of demonstration or concrete examples.

Fourth, never be afraid of those in the bureaucracy who will marginalize your managerial role and functions. That comes in the territory. Be good in managing the situation. The governance protocol in projects is often not observed because some people have been given ad hoc or informal authority. Be calm and composed and do not go into unproductive cat fights for control of turf. Always show principled leadership to overcome the damage which may occur on account of ad hoc or informal exercise of management functions.

Fifth, practise servant leadership and go an extra mile with political leaders and government officers you deal with. Have an extra storage of patience and if you feel you cannot bear the elitist tendency of the people you work with, take a little walk for some fresh air and say, "This, too, shall pass." Then come back and try to make sense of the situation and decide on what you have to do under the circumstances without putting the project in a bad light.

Sixth, always be professional and maintain the dignity of being in the service of the the disadvantaged and marginalized through development projects funded by the people of other countries. Not all development workers are given this opportunity. Show respect to fellow workers despite differences.

Seventh, smile though your heart is breaking, as the song says. In case the project is declared a failure or get aborted, never engage in a blame game.Consider the whole thing as a learning experience for all.It will be productive if you will be able to get everybody together and honestly look into the experience and reduce self-serving statements from everybody to a manageable level.

Survival Blues

For more than 40 years, our involvement with NGOs has been guided by the principle and bias of working closely with local governments. We decided on this strategy at a time in the late 1970s when it was not fashionable for NGOs to work with government. In fact, NGOs such as COPE in Cebu and others even if they were not organized by the left, adhered to what they called "No linkage with Government policy." In those days, the surest way to lose credibility was for an NGO to be known as DJANGO, an entity working as close partner of Government.

For our part, we were sandbagged into embracing an approach in close partnership with Government due to the bias imposed by the background of groups represented in the "Ilaw ng Buhay (Light of Life)" program in the late 70s. Those who came from the pioneering Presidential Assistant for Community Development (PACD) had a bias for working with local governments on account of the rationale for the creation of PACD itself, which is to strengthen local government capacities to extend basic services from the center to the periphery.

Those who came to the organization from the various technical disciplines (environment; agriculture; social services; health and education) had a profound respect for the role of technical departments as source of information and expertise vital to community development work.

The few who came from the left and for one reason or another surfaced from the underground to join the NGO (or were ordered to join it by the Military, nobody knows!) had to be part of the partnership approach either as a necessity or were just plain sick and tired of living life on the run.

To the credit of everyone in the organization, from the early days to the present BLDF, what was known informally as the "jawbone approach" (upper jaw - government; lower jaw - community) gained wide acceptance by both government agencies and NGOs. The theory and practice of the this collaborative approach became documented in case studies and other researches and this contributed to getting more support from international donor agencies looking for ways to bring services to the very doorstep of the target family.

I recall doing my dissertation for my Masters degree in management using the collaborative framework as experienced by our NGO from the pilot stage to advocacy and then institutionalization with the setting up of the Ilaw International Center as resource center for the replication of the approach. While the approach became widely accepted, however, this support from the Government and donors did not translate into ensuring the sustainability of our NGO. Our innovations in both the process and the approach to community development have been achieved with great financial sacrifice on the part of those who compose the old Ilaw ng Buhay organization and the present Bohol Local Development Foundation.

The cost of developing, for instance, the pro-poor targeting system and software known as PDMS has been paid for through the sacrifices of those who have remained with our NGO involvement through the past three decades.

We continue to be burdened with survival blues. Here is truly a crossroad - to survive or just perish.

Crossroads

Crossroads are crucial to milestones. You arrive at a point; there are choices and possible options to make and you need to take a pause and decide. We are familiar with this situation although we may not term it as crossroads: the choice of which college degree to pursue; whether to get married or not; to choose where to live; to buy or sell a certain property so we can use the money for something we think as more important and so on.

A day is not complete without being confronted to make a choice, whether major or minor, depending on the possible impact to our life. Some are quite important that choices appear to us as clearly marked crossroads;  all the roads seem equally important in deciding where we want to go.

Some choices are difficult to do especially if it means giving away something that you have sacrificed for and value above so many things in your life.Take our involvement with development work, particularly NGO work. There are always crossroads to take whether to continue it or not and probably, we share this situation with other colleagues who pursue development work in their own NGOs.

In the old days, say almost thirty years ago, it was of course simpler to decide whether to join or form an NGO. You have an innovative idea and the Government is not ready to try it and hence, it allows you to do it largely outside government efforts. Hence, in those days, we used to say that NGOs exist "to take advantage of the opportunities left behind by government efforts." Government is not ready to do something and some people take the initiative to do it - supposed to be temporarily until it is taken over by the Government.

In our case, in the NGOs we were involved in, there was the recognition something could be better done first outside Government with the understanding that the latter would somehow replicate or integrate our outputs in terms of strategies, training and operations methodologies or that there would be sharing of lessons learned. On the part of NGOs and the Government, there was commonality of interests in the quest for more effective means to organize and involve communities in local-level planning and decision-making; on how to generate support from the Church and other influential institutions; on how to increase the outreach of services to remote communities with local volunteers and organizations; or how to institutionalize development objectives in local plans.


In the course of time, however, the rationale for the existence of NGOs seems to have been blurred by the need to survive from day to day; you need to submit proposals to donors year in and year out to get some funding for projects; the involvement with Government deteriorated into something like an employer-employee relationship since the Goverment has become the source of funding for some activities; the NGOs
have lost their creative edge on account of circumstances brought about by dependence on donors and the Government for survival.

From Project Compassion to Ilaw ng Buhay and to BLDF, we have lived through so many crossroads and always we wind up not taking the road least taken by NGOs in similar situations - the choice to just fade away and leave everything to Government and to other civil society institutions the quest for better ways to do development work.

Now we are in this critical juncture again but the choice may not be difficult because most of us are actually in the sunset of our lives. Nature will probably do the choosing for us.



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New Optimism for the DReAMS Project

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.

Lessons from the Ilaw ng Buhay Program 666

Both in-house evaluation and independent studies commissioned by UNICEF, the donor agency, confirmed the effectiveness of the Ilaw ng Buhay approach to community development as field-tested in several cities and municipalities in the Philippines from 1978 to 1982. The innovative features, as compared to the conventional extension-type approach, are as follows:

• the use of the neighborhood group, as against the sectoral grouping e.g. fisherfolks, farmers, women, youth, etc., makes possible the broad-based identification of community needs;
• interviewing "reference families" from among the poorest in the community and visiting public markets, as well as doing consultation work with local leaders, adds relevance to pre-packaged core messages during training; 
• use of emotional appeal and  religious symbolism ensures acceptance of messages by the target audience; 
• deployment of senior development workers in field teams makes possible the success of the jawbone approach or facilitating social preparation work with communities and households (lower jaw) and local government units (upper jaw); and 
• child-based concerns as entry points for community diagnosis and program content neutralizes opposition from groups which have issues against the government.

The Crazy Co., as the organization which implemented the Ilaw approach was called, felt the pressure to institutionalize the program as strategy or requirement for replication. There must be a way to get the aging members of the team to act more as mentors rather than as field operatives and help multiply the number of development workers who could carry out the approach.

Thus the idea for establishing the Ilaw International Center (IIC) was born. As part of UNICEF's support to the concept, we were sent to take up some short courses at the Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development (BARD) and at the Project Planning Center at the University of Bradford in Yorkshire, England.

Our brief stay in these institutions gave us the opportunity to research further on how to bring about an institution that would replace eventually the Crazy Co. in the propagation of the innovative approach to community development.

We were about to enroll at the University of Swansea in late 1982 to take up a Master's degree course when Atty. Ramon P. Binamira summoned us back to the Philippines to head the team that would establish the center in Tagbilaran City in Bohol. Among the team members handpicked for the mission  were Dr. Pomie Buot, a medical doctor who used to head the Project Compassion team in Misamis Occidental; Rogelio Alegado, a former teacher from Digos, Davao who was recruited as local development trainer and eventually joined the regular staff; Eleno Laga, seasoned community development worker and head of the team in Guindulman, Bohol; Ver Lumacang, Project Compassion head of Tagbilaran City; and Ben Benitez, veteran trainer from the Tagbilaran team.

The others from the Crazy Co. would come for a visit of two to three weeks from Manila to reenforce the team: the deputies of Atty. Binamira, Bitoy Ramos, Pio Almodiel and Ben Garcia; Admin Officer Oco Orozco; Training Officer Ike Tolentino and Information Officer Bimboy Penaranda. Later, members from teams outside Manila, would also come for assignments at the IIC : Raul Tiosayco and Sims Leal from Iloilo; Gem Legarta from Misamis Occidental; Fred Leano from the Ilocos.

A research staff was formed headed by Tonette Zablan from University of San Carlos. Other young people came to join the staff: Arecio Inting, marine biologist; researchers Cheche Pandy, Leila Manding, Weng Prado, Victor Dequito, trainers Melia Dalagan, the Solera couple Yolly Arboladura was designated as librarian but also assisted in administration and training.

Chris D'Silva, a Bangladeshi,  served as volunteer driver-mechanic in those early days. More staff were hired as the IIC expanded its facilities to include a mess hall which doubled up as a restaurant at night and a dormitory for participants which also admitted guests to raise much-needed revenues for the center. 

How the IIC was built from concept to reality could be an interesting read and source of valuable lessons, too.

More on this in the next blog.