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IN Lima,
Peru, hundreds of so-called PEP researchers and
stakeholders from Asia, Latin America and Africa are
meeting this week for the Sixth Poverty and Economic
Policy (PEP) Network General Meeting and are expected
to, among others, advocate the usefulness of local
monitoring systems for reducing poverty, improving
governance and furthering other development initiatives.
Among
those invited to attend them is Palawan Gov. Joel Reyes,
mainly because other people want to find out about his
province’s experience in using a Community-Based
Monitoring System (CBMS), particularly in local planning
and budgeting, preparation of the provincial human
development report, and for localizing the United
Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
Palawan,
it must be noted, is probably the first province on
record to produce its own localized Human Development
Report, way back in 2001, following the example set by
the United Nations Development Program’s global HDR
issued annually.
To
Palawan’s east, another province has made history in
local planning and governance. Now, Bohol may these days
be in the news mainly because of its tourist
attractions, but last year, Bohol’s local leaders showed
they were ahead of their peers when they made the first
attempt to put out a localized system for monitoring
compliance at the municipal level with the MDGs, a set
of eight time-bound goals that nearly 200 heads of state
signed in year 2000.
Under
the MDGS, countries hope to, among others, halve poverty
by 2015, cut maternal and child mortality, promote
universal education, and expand coverage of water and
sanitation.
The
Bohol initiative, made possible through a tie-up between
the provincial government, the UP National Center for
Public Administration and Governance (NCPAG), and local
and global NGOs like the Social Watch Philippines and
Action for Economic Reforms and the Dutch’s Novib,
proved that compliance with MDGs can be made faster,
more efficiently and—this is crucial—more evenly and
equitably if the tools for monitoring MDG status at the
local level have been refined and are working with
precision.
Further
south of Palawan and Bohol, another area has shown how
contextualizing poverty, with focus on local initiatives
for monitoring, planning, governance and setting
accountabilities, can greatly speed up the campaign to
improve quality of life.
According to a front-page report in this paper’s June 11
issue by reporter Manuel Cayon, the Autonomous Region in
Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) has slowly but surely gotten out
of the “blighted” list since 2003—before then, most of
the region’s five provinces and one city were on
previous editions of the “poorest” areas list.
Now,
only one, Maguindanao, remains. Cayon’s report says
other provinces like Sulu, Tawi-Tawi, Basilan and Lanao
del Sur have been “pulled up from the cellar by the
concentration of official development aid to the region,
among others.”
Several
years before that, those involved in the original peace
and development programs after the signing of the
September 2, 1996, peace agreement between the Ramos
government and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF)
had taught local leaders the rudiments of needs-based
planning, precisely so that the erstwhile warriors, more
attuned to running military units and their communities
that for decades had built their activities around the
insurgents’ war efforts, would slowly learn that
poverty, to be irreversibly surmounted, must begin with
a clear assessment of one’s condition.
The
Cayon report quoted the Mindanao Development Council (Medco)
as saying that the ARMM could be a model for pulling
provinces out of the poverty lists by making local chief
executives actively contribute in setting up
“transparent governance and accountability mechanisms.”
Indeed,
slowly but surely, progress in the war against poverty
is being made, but mainly in those places where there is
a strong local—note the stress on the
local—determination among the leaders, communities and
other stakeholders to get to the root of the problem
breeding poverty in a particular context, and attacking
this head-on.
This
wisdom, drawn from the experiences of experts and
communities, explains why in this same space we
assailed, weeks before the May 14 election, the national
government’s shotgun approach to poverty and
malnutrition by that suspiciously timed rice
distribution program in public schools. We wondered why
the national government does not take a leaf from the
already proven successes of certain local governments
(like Jojo Binay’s Makati City or Lito Atienza’s Manila)
that have used well-thought-out school-feeding programs
to make discernible improvements in nutrition indicators
and in other services that help roll back poverty in all
its forms.
We said
then that, rather than spend billions for imported rice,
the national government should encourage local
governments and leaders to take a very focused approach
to their peculiar conditions that give rise to poverty—a
point that has been precisely proven by the experiences
of Palawan, Bohol and some of the Mindanao provinces
that have climbed out of the rut in recent years.
Unfortunately, it seems harder to persuade national
leaders, with their biased approaches, to look at
problems in particular contexts. We need the enlightened
local leaders to do that, with some help maybe from NGOs
local and foreign, as well as from some multilateral
agencies.
Hopefully the recent elections have provided the
electorate with fresh local blood; some effective local
leaders lost the race nonetheless, but offhand, it’s
good to note that quite a good number of new LGU chiefs
are ones who show promise—being forward-looking, honest,
educated, with good experience in feeling the public
pulse and a grasp of the basics of good governance.
Let’s
hope their presence makes the difference in a critical
mass of localities. |
