Some Notes on PDMS

In a week's time, we will launch a new website, www.pdmsplus.com. It will provide information on the Poverty Database Monitoring System and how it can be used to complement other planning tools, such as ecoBUDGET; how LGUs and CSO's can have access to PDMS; and updates on how the poverty database is used as pro-poor targeting tool by various projects.

While looking for articles to post, I found a memorandum-report which I sent to the BLDF staff some years  back, on 29 June 2009. I will post excerpts from this Memorandum to provide some background notes on PDMS during the early years. In 2009, the PDMS software was on its 6th year, as developed by the Senior IT Consultant, Tony Irving.

Here are the excerpts:

1.3       Just for the record because you know this yourselves, I recognize the valuable contributions done by the following institutions, agencies and individuals in translating a concept into a feasible pro-poor targeting and project monitoring tool which can potentially benefit a lot more LGUs and NGOs and their clientele among the world’s poor:

1.3.1    The late Atty. Juanito G. Cambangay who organized the database task force at PPDO in 2003 to find ways to establish a common platform to bring information from all existing databases and make it available to all users for planning and monitoring;

1.3.2    Rogelio Alegado (Note: Roger passed away more than a year ago), a member of the task force, who demonstrated the ranking of municipalities in Bohol using four indicators which was a pioneering effort to use available information manually processed to reflect poverty ranking;

1.3.3    Anthony Irving, a VSO volunteer recruited to assist the PPDO database task force, and who later became the programmer for the LPRAP software in 2004 and IT consultant to BLDF for a British-assisted project and is credited with technical enhancements leading to the current PDMS version 2.3;

1.3.4    Arnold Seloterio, BLDF Database Administrator, who served as counterpart staff to the IT Consultant as part of a capacity-building process for PDMS;

1.3.5    Mayors, Sandigang Bayan, and MPDCs of the initial 17 municipalities which agreed to fund the initial household poverty surveys in 2004 to 2005 when the project encountered problems in securing AusAID assistance;

1.3.6    British Embassy Manila c/o Joseph Imperial which funded a one-year project which enabled BLDF through IT Consultant Tony Irving to improve further the features of the software,  and through the Holy Name University Center for Local Governance to revise and field-test the survey methodology and questionnaires used;

1.3.7    Ms. Josephine Cemine and Maria Paz Espiritu of HNU who reviewed the survey questionnaire and methodology used and revised after pilot-testing recommended changes;

1.3.8    AusAID PACAP c/o Ms. May Blanco which promotes the use of PDMS in projects that it funds in Bohol;

1.3.9    Ms. Tonette Zablan and the CVSCAFT Research Department which conducted researches on how PDMS has been used by LGUs and NGOs, respectively;

1.3.10  Ms. Erin Hoffman, a graduate student from Boston College, who spent a 7-week internship with BLDF to assist in field-testing the ABCD methodology and survey guidelines to generate household and community information on assets for the PDMS.

1.4       During the last three years, it has been shown that the PDMS survey can be conducted and the survey installed not only by LGUs in Bohol, but other LGUs in the country, i.e. San Fernando City, La Union; Lucban, Quezon; General Santos City; Sultan Kudaratat, etc., and several non-traditional clients, e.g. a Catholic parish in Davao City. Abroad, PDMS was installed in Timor Leste and Solomon Islands.

1.5       As early as 2006, it was felt that a more focused and systematic way to replicate PDMS needs to be in place to make it available to a wide range of users.

1.5.1    Activities towards creating the LPRAP Support Center, later renamed the Poverty Studies Center, were included in the British-funded Strengthening Local Governance Project (SLGP). Although considered an output of the project, the PSC could not take off due to lack of funding to hire additional staff. The PSC was conceived due to the inability of the Provincial Government to provide  systematic support to LGUs and other PDMS clients on technical matters related to PDMS

1.5.2    In September 2007, soon after he retired, the late Atty. Cambangay supported the idea of forming a corporate body, the Institute of Poverty Studies and Responsive Governance, to address this problem of providing systematic support to LGUs and other clients on how to establish, update and use the household poverty database for their respective poverty reduction programs. Unfortunately, he passed away soon after having the SEC papers prepared and recruiting incorporators.

1.5.3    Meanwhile, the team of Tony Irving and Arnold Seloterio served as volunteers to provide technical assistance to LGUs regarding PDMS. While they were given fees for their services, but these were not commensurate to the tasks that they were doing. The LGUs owe them a debt a gratitude for these unselfish efforts on their part.

1.5.3    Part-time efforts to market PDMS abroad suffered setbacks on account of inadequate time to pursue clients. There was the technical issue raised about the link to DevInfo, the software used by the UN System to track the MDGs globally. While this was technically responded to by the IT Consultant, explaining it to prospective clients would require tremendous time and efforts.

1.5.4    While attending an urban planning workshop in Bangkok in 2007, I got wind of a new school of thought about community development. Rather than look at problems alone, this new approach identifies assets as basis for interventions in addressing poverty-related problems. This approach came to be known as ABCD or Asset Based Community Development to distinguish it from the basic needs approach which underlies most development methodologies and tools, including PDMS.

1.5.4.1 Pioneered at the Northwestern University in the US at the start of the decade, a few tools have been developed to date. Efforts have been made to replicate these tools in a few universities in the US and some other countries. In the Philippines, ABCD is relatively unknown except perhaps to some community development professionals.

1.5.4.2 We were able to follow up on an earlier request for an intern from Boston College. The college sent Erin Hoffman who was able to spend the first quarter of 2008 working as a member of the BLDF field team developing the survey methodology for ABCD in Anda and San Isidro. Later, the survey design was field-tested in Pilar.

1.5.4.3 Meanwhile, the IT Consultant, Tony Irving, was able to develop the ABCD component as part of PDMS software. Version 2.3 of PDMS has been installed in several municipalities in Bohol starting in late 2008. Thanks to the efforts of both Tony and Digoy and the LGUs and other clients which have funded conduct of the resurvey based on the revised questionnaire and the installation of the new PDMS version.

1.5.5    Arnold Seloterio, the local counterpart of the IT Consultant, left for Singapore to work. Digoy Ocarol took his place as Database Administrator as counterpart IT Specialist to Tony. BLDF could not give them regular pay. They have to generate income from contracts signed by BLDF with clients. In effect, they are project-based staff.

1.5.6    While I was able to help in promoting PDMS with EU project in Mindanao, my work with Habitat 
             International limited my efforts to do much else. 

Now we enter a new stage for PDMS with its version 3.0 developed with assistance from the EU-funded DReAMS' (Development of Resources for Access to Municipal Services) project. For the features of this new version, kindly visit www.pdmsplus.com. Three young volunteers are helping us put up this website: Daidee Padron, who serves as coordinator; Natnat Hinay, IT Specialist and Webmaster; and Charisse Aya-ay, researcher/artist. 

More exciting days ahead for PDMS and its companion tools. 

More on Microfinance

 Here is an input from Johannes Seian Manzanilla, based in Switzerland, as response to Microfinance Blues:

I read your Blog Entry about Microfinance and the people who do not pay back. And it made me think and wonder. This must be a very difficult situation for you and the foundation. What are your strategies to deal with this?

It saddens and disappoints me that those people you were trying to help, now refuse to pay back. But then can we really blame them? As you noted, is it a shift in our social values and culture? As I made my short research I see there are indeed organizations who successfully provide micro financing and I wonder how they do it.

In a forum I  found an interesting comment on the Grameen bank System:

"I've read Yunus book about the Grameen bank, and he explains the system (I don't know how Kiva and other companies follow that principle, but I assume they use similar because it was sucessful).
First, the bank doesn't come to the people, the people come to the bank: they see that a bank circle in the neighbouring village has made people more sucessful, or their relatives tell them about it. So the curious go and talk to an established circle of members, and learn the requirements: go out and get 5 interested members and form your own circle.

Then you contact the bank, and an employee comes along to your circle, explains all the rules (Grameen requires courses for health, contraception, no bride price, literacy etc.). Once everybody agrees to the rules and signs the contract, the classes start and bookkeeping.
The first credit will not be 500$, more like 5$ *. The circle decides on who needs it most and what to to with it - so a business idea must exist, and it must look reasonable.

The circle meets every week for strategy, classes, bookkeeping and also savings and repayments. (The bank can put in a clause that the members have to save up a certain amount first before gettin a loan to show dedication and financial responsibility).

If you look at it negatively, it's peer pressure; positively, it's feedback and social networking.

Also, most members of a circle are women; many experiences in 3rd world countries show that women think of their hungry children at home and save the money, where men tend to give in to despair and spend the money on alcohol or drugs or gambling. So this also contributes to higher rates of payback and savings.
Another point is that in these villages, everyones survival depends on the community. If you are outcast because you default and damage the society, you have no chance, except leaving the village, which is in itself a drastic step.

The people don't think of defaulting because usually Grameen gives them the chance to become productive and self-sustaining, with a steady business income or improved future for their children. They know they will never get a chance like this again elsewhere.

And the above mentioned entrance barriers - that people have to form the circle first, and agree to a contract, instead of the bank going around handing out loans to anybody vertical and breathing - means that the few poor people who don't have the motivation or power to run a business don't apply.

It's not true that most poor people are lazy or bad with money; most poor people are kept down through a combination of circumstances outside their power to change. The few people who conform to the stereotype of lazy or wastes money on frivioulous stuff just get all the headlines to confirm the clichees and for reasons of political agenda.

And the reason for the high default rates in the West is greed of the banks, not the creditors. Banks can do very thorough background checks for credits, or give a loan to anybody upright and breathing ...

Oh, and yes, the Grameen bank has very high costs because the employees have to visit all these villages every week to collect payments, do the bookkeeping until the women have caught up with their literacy classes, etc. It requires more effort than sitting in a AC controlled office waiting for your customers to come to you; but Yunus only hires people who are willing to go to their customers. Still, the rates are about 20 to 30 %, which would otherwise be cut-throat, but covers the services provided. Since these loans are investments in the future, and not new car type of loans, they are still a better choice than the usual cutthroat credit of 100% and more, and one default, and the only cow is gone, destroying all income.

(Some microfinance is run by Churches, like Brot für die Welt, which do the service stuff for free to help; an existing group structure makes things easier.)

Microfinance is so sucessful that scammers are starting to take advantage of this, pressing loans to people without the preparation and thus ruining them. So Grameen warns people to only use serious groups.
* 5$ may not sound much, but the example that started Yunus on his ideas was that of a woman weaving baskets or hats and renting the tools and buying the material each morning from the supplier, and getting the difference at the rest of the day was far too low despite working all day. When Yunus asked her how much she would need to break this cycle, she replied "5$" to buy the tools once and for all, and buy a small supply of material as start.

That got Yunus thinking, on how many more people he could help with small loans. " ###

Here is my reply:  

Much thanks for your input and the research. We must really go to the basics. I think along the way we were misled or were not too strict about the process to be followed. Client selection is important. We were too kind and charitable and failed to do proper character investigation. Also there are factors we cannot control. For instance, those affecting the enterprises that the people put up are subject to risks from the climate, competition from others, lack of marketing connection, etc. Anyway, we will get out of this messy situation. learn our lessons as an NGO and move on. 

Hannes, much thanks for the concern.

Advice from Levi Verora, Microfinance Expert

 On Microfinance Blues

Within minutes after posting Microfinance Blues, our friend and microfinance expert, Levi Verora, posted a response. Let me share this with you. Levi, much thanks.

 I would like to share with our FB friends, particularly those involved in microfinance, the following advice from Levi P. Verora, a microfinance expert, in response to my previous blog, Microfinance Blues:


hi nes. levi here. some points on microfinance of bohol foundation. microfinancing is supposed to bring hope to poor borrowers to rise above their situation. that has been the intention when Grameen Bank, Comilla Proshika, Proshika Comilla, and other MFIs were formed in Bangladesh. but a mindsetting (paradigm shift, they would say) had to take place among the all-women borrowers themselves till they formed part of a movement, a crusade to fight poverty.

now back to Bohol. microfinancing must be articulated fully well with the foundation's borrowers. they must have a mindset like that of the all-women, poor Bangladeshi borrowers. if that is not taken or made to ripe, the borrowers will not feel obliged to repay their loans and honor other obligations. second, there must be a way to spot and screen loan applicants. begin with an assessment of their character, then capacity to pay, then collateral (if any), then capitalization (equity or savings of their own), and finally capability to manage the loan amounts and grow out their businesses. third, there is no sense if they remain borrowers operating various livelihood endeavors.

there must be stinging ways to graduate them into micro and even small entrepreneurs, with growing businesses and networth. here, business advising and coaching will matter a lot, alongside compliant monitoring and evaluation. there are more points I wish to share, but the space is limited.  when I get to visit you one day, we'll talk about them. cheers.

Microfinance Blues

The other day I met with the finance committee of the Foundation composed of Dr. Pomie Buot, Myrna Angalot-Lu, Joy Arac and Joal Velas. They were worried that BLDF might not be able to pay back the loan amounting to the creditor by the end of this year. It was the same story as last year. Same problem - those who took out micro-loans, ranging from Php 5,000 to Php 15,000, have not been paying. Same faces. And, probably, same solution, I was telling myself as I listened to their woes.

Same reasons were given for the non-payment of the loans: the cooperatives could not sell their produce; there was no fish caught or no farm produce because of bad weather; the money was spent for tuition fees, medicines and other emergencies; they just could not pay, period.

The community organizer who serves also as collector of payments said the clients were getting harder to deal with. Some dared him to call the police and arrest them, knowing that this was against the law; others were just plain non-committal and would not give any pledge when they would pay; majority of them would give dates when they would pay the loans but from their past behavior you know they would not honor their word.

And so what to do? A number of options were again listed down, the same that were in those lists in countless meetings before, none of them worked: let them sign promissory notes; charge them in small grants court; get them to pay in kind, e.g. getting part of their harvest of rice, tomatoes, fruits, etc. None of these worked in the past; hence, how could these strategies work now?

We seemed to be running of options. Same analysis of previous lapses: we did not apply due diligence in the the choice of debtors; we listened  more to our partners about the selection of project sites which made us operate in places too far and expensive to reach; some of those who took our loans were approved by former employees, who are no longer around. 

Meanwhile, we have to maintain the collector in terms of monthly salary, fuel allowance for the motorbikes, food.

Most likely, we will again look for sources, other than the debtors, to pay back the loan. Same solution as last year. It is an expensive to pay for the lapses. We did not anticipate this kind of misbehavior, some of them we know have the capability to pay. Could it be that social values are shifting, people no longer honor their word? When they came, they were really quite dramatic in their depiction of their hapless situation. When it was to collect, they either disappeared or they pretended it was the first time they were meeting the collector.

The sad part is that there is no resource institution or agency we could turn to and tell our story. Success stories are what they tell each other during workshops which sound like fairy tales to us. How did the other NGOs manage their microfinance facility? What have been the lessons learned? This non-payment of loans, is this a common experience? Nobody seems to care and we are left on our own to solve this puzzle.

Chances are, the finance committee will again borrow money from their respective families and other sources of credit. Yes, we will end up poorer than the farmers and fisherfolk we have been trying to help.

Sad but true.

Discussion with the Academe on Poverty

Last 09 April, we had a three-hour session with some 19 representatives from several colleges and universities from different regions of the country. They were participants/resource persons of  the Philippine Transformative Approaches to Innovative Leadership (TRAIL) Summer Youth Camp organized by the Youth Leadership Excellence for Active Development (YouthLEAD) Philippines, in partnership with the Philippine Society of Young Good Citizens and the Bohol Alliance of Student Councils.

I was invited to serve as Topic Speaker on the subject, "Developing Social Impact in Student Governance."

We started the session by the participants citing what they considered as priority problems in their respective municipalities or where their academic institutions were located. As expected, all of them cited common problems such as: unemployment; lack of housing; inadequate health facilities; malnutrition; overpopulation; low agricultural productivity; poor garbage collection; logging; traffic congestion, etc. The other problems cited were "sex scandals" involving students; poor governance or political interference in development; drug addiction; vote buying; and lack of family values.

It was pointed out towards the end of this initial one-hour session that most of these problems could be traced to poverty while some problems were environment-related.

To provide a basis for the discussion on what to do with these problems, particularly at local level, e.g. college or community, I presented two tools which have been used in Bohol in efforts to address problems related to poverty and how interventions could be made using initially local resources.

I showed the key features of the Poverty Database Monitoring System (PDMS) software and used it to process the household poverty database of the municipality of Baclayon based on its resurvey last 2009.
For the new approach to providing interventions, I cited the content of the current 5-year Community-Based Eco-Cultural Plan of Baclayon, which is Bohol's first comprehensive application of the ABCD approach to local-level planning.

In their response to the presentations, the participants were cited the following:

• The solutions to poverty need not be generated from outside, but local resources could be identified to address poverty-related problems. 
• Projects with long gestation period may not be suitable for student groups to undertake on account of their temporary stay on the campus. 
• Advisers need to provide examples and guide student groups to link their plans and projects to problems related to poverty and the environment. 
• The school, the community and the family must work together to address poverty and that student activities must support initiatives along this line. 

There was limited time to explore further what specific ideas the advisers could explore with student groups in their respective colleges. The session was more of building awareness about a pro-poor targeting tool that could help ensure that households more disadvantaged than others could be identified and given immediate assistance by the local government and its partners. 

Post-Meeting Reflection 

Hours after the discussion with the advisers I was preoccupied on what could really be done by student groups given their limited time and academic load and still link their extra-curricular activities meaningfully to the global agenda on poverty reduction and sustainable development. 

Here are some ideas: 

-Collecting bottles and using them to reinforce rocks or other materials used in slopes to check soil erosion. 

Bottles of wines and liquor are not returned to the seller or supplier and they usually end up in activity areas in a town or in the garbage dump. In both places, they run the risk of being broken and pose a threat to the safety of persons or children. They cannot be sold; hence, they have no commercial value as far as the people are concerned. In Baclayon, efforts have been done to collect them and volunteers are trained at Balay Kahayag on how to use them to reinforce contouring in sloping areas. 

Just to find out how many bottles could be collected from a public area, such as the town's baluarte or pier, we collected bottles and counted them on 01 Apr and 05 Apr. We were a able to collect a total of 153 bottles in those two days, broken down as follows: Emperador Light, 116 (75%); assorted wine, 24 (16%); and Tanduay rhum, 13 (9%). The average number of bottles collected per day is 75. 

This involves only 1 collector with the help of two or three utility persons assigned to clean the baluarte area. 

Imagine if the advisers could mobilize student groups to collect such bottles all over a city or municipality where they are located and use them for other purposes, such as for saving the soil, etc. The impact will be quite great in terms of checking soil erosion. Perhaps some enterprising students will find some other uses for the discarded bottles and engage local communities in activities in livelihood projects using these bottles. 

-Conducting a survey on what exactly the families are doing in terms of livelihood and finding out their actual needs to scale up the livelihood activities in terms of better marketing, use of technology, improved design. Teams of students can be mobilized during their spare time to just walk around and do a survey with priority in more disadvantaged communities. The findings can help them formulate more relevant projects and at the same time, make them aware of the actual situation in their local communities, their problems and potential. 

I am sure there are many ways the advisers and the student groups can think of to relate their plans and projects to poverty and the environment. Our hope is that they will focus on identifying those who are most in need and identifying simple projects that could directly benefit them. 

Thoughts About Our Faith

The influence of the Catholic Church on the way we conduct our lives is quite strong and pervasive. As a boy growing up in a village in Quezon Province, I experienced it practically in all aspects of our lives, from baptism and confirmation to the fiestas; May-time processions of flowers and candles; weddings; and, of course, during wakes.

The priest is always there presiding over rituals and ceremonies, giving sermons and spiritual advice on occasions during our growing -up period and even in old age when one needs counsel to endure pain and accept the inevitability of death. During the years when I refused to go to Mass and participate in Church activities, I would steal some moments to go inside the Church or chapel when it was empty and find solace in just looking at the altar, stained windows and hearing in my heart the silence of the universe, as it were.

In college, when I learned in our sociology class that there is no universal standard of religion, I started to read a lot about other religions, Protestantism, Buddhism, Hinduism and the Muslim faith in a quest for something to believe in. There was intellectual ferment on the campus in those days. The writings and pronouncements of  a group called freethinkers challenged from day to day the beliefs instilled to us by our Catholic faith.

Aside from this interest in other religions, I experienced during those years in the Sixties stimulating conversations not only about whether God existed or not, but the various philosophies being taught in courses or by reading them in the campus library and being talked about in the coffee shops and bar joints: existentialism; transcendatlism; logical positivism; and, finally, Marxism. It was a period of ferment, of looking for certainties, and enduring truths about life but in the end, we all ended up, like a procession, by the door of the church whose rituals we had abandoned.

The jolly Pope John XXIII, who walked down streets in sandals, briefly captured our fancy and most of those who had left the Church came back attracted by his populist and pro-poor rhetorics. When he died, a little bit of us also died with him. This was how influential the Catholic Church is in our lives.

It was only in 1987 when I returned to the practice of the Catholic faith, going to Mass, taking communion and all that stuff. Several personal tragedies struck, such as the passing away of my Mother the year before, and my Lola's demise on this year, just after my girl friend left me. My close friends brought me to the Jesuit Retreat House in Banawa Hills, Cebu City, where I came under the tutelage and care of a 42-year old activist priest, Fr. Bliss Cavan. For two weeks, he patiently mentored me on the faith, just the two of us, until I could walk again confident in the knowledge I do not really walk alone.

My decision to leave in Bohol, bringing here the remains of my mother, lola, and sister, including those of a half-sister, was pivotal in so many decisions I would make later about how to spend the remainder of my life. Most importantly, I was able to endure pangs of conscience and guilt feelings about my inability to get my mother, grandmother and my sisters out of poverty. It took me years to overcome these guilt feelings and again, it was the Church I turned to for guidance.

Like other Catholics, I have followed the sex scandals and some other unsavory incidents involving the Church but by and large, we remain loyal to what it says regarding the values to guide one's life. Given its 1.2 billion members, of varying degrees of loyalty to its beliefs, the transformation of the Church will be one of the wonders of the century. More than the washing of feet and the walking down urban streets, the Church has to be an institution genuinely committed to the world's poor.

It will be a great thing, a miracle even, if it happens in our lifetime.

The Roman Catholic Church and Poverty

This topic is very much in the news with the election of a new Pope who projects himself as pro-poor with his adoption of a name associated with a deep love for the poor and the downtrodden. All the media coverage and pronouncements from the Vatican have all been consistent in positioning the new Pope as a seemingly uncompromising advocate for plans and programs that will benefit the poor.

It will be interesting to find out how this apparent adoption of a pro-poor policy will get reflected in programs implemented by Church institutions at national and sub-national levels or more importantly, in local communities more disadvantaged than others. The vigorous media campaign on this new thrust has effectively deflected media noise and public concerns from sex scandals involving priests. Quite a smart move on the part of the Vatican mass media department.

It will be interesting how the new policy thrust (I actually do not know the old thrust, if there is one!) in Bohol, in the province where I have lived for a significant number of years. The province is noted for being religious and conservative; there are chapels or small bisita at village level. It is a place where you can find priests even in remote areas. The province also supplies a good number of priests to parishes in nearby provinces in the Visayas and Mindanao.

Bohol is one of the few provinces, if not the only one, where the public pray three times a day in the various shopping malls: at the opening of the shops in the morning; at 3 p.m. for what they call the three o'clock habit; and during Angelus, at 6 in the evening. Since the 1980s, all the tricycles in the town display Biblical sayings. It is a province where children and young people carry on the tradition of kissing the hand of elders as sign of respect.

You can see the credibility of the Church, including the barangay chapels, on Sundays during the two rounds of solicitations for contributions in each Mass. The response for cash contributions seems consistently significant. In Baclayon, for instance, a municipality of only around 9,000 households, the church raised the staggering amount of Php 12 million in three years for a modern convent where the parish priests live. In the light of the new pro-poor thrust of Pope Francis, it will be interesting to find out if the parishioners' contributions will now go to pro-poor projects of the Social Action Center.

This publicity about the Catholic Church and Poverty has led me to remember some traumatic experiences I had in my home province, Quezon, which profoundly influenced the path I took in my life.

In my second year high in Lucena, at the Quezon Provincial High School, I was encouraged to be an auxiliary member of the Legion of Mary, a popular lay organization involved in both spiritual and social welfare activities. As auxiliary or junior member, at age 14, I was assigned to a community of informal settlers in the abandoned airstrip in Lucena a few kilometers from our school.

My task was collect information from each family, e.g. were the husband and wife married in church; the children baptized or given confirmation; did they go to church on Sunday. I recall being always shouted out of the house. More often, I would arrive in the house and find the father or an adult member of the family drunk and in a foul mood.

By the rude way they answered me, I knew my questions were not their concerns. Eventually, I lost interest in my task as volunteer, but I learned early enough how people could be quite hostile or uncooperative on issues they consider irrelevant.

My other bad experience with the church was when I was in my junior year, at age 15.  As I said in an earlier blog, my father died at 23. I was not able to mention it last time; he died of tuberculosis. He was a calesa driver. I grew up in a family of women, with my Grandmother, Mother and younger sister.

It was not easy growing up in such environment. There were questions you could not ask them. When I got bullied in school, I could not run to them. When I could not buy snacks and was reduced to watching my classmates having snacks during recess, I could not run to them to ask for money.

Whenever I was in such situation or when I met problems, emotional or otherwise, that I could not tell my family about them, I ran to my father's grave and either cried there, prayed or just talked to his grave. Then one day, to my utter dismay and disgust, when I ran up the cemetery, my father's grave was not there. Instead, there was this ornate Chinese tomb in its place complete with all the floral decor, food stuff and big colored candles indicating some people just dug out the grave and put the tomb in its place.

I ran away from the cemetery to the factory where my Mother was working and told her what I had seen. She said very calmly that if we were not able to pay the annual fee of  50 pesos for 15 years , our space would be given to another applicant. I told her that since the church record had our name and address, could not the church at least inform us and then allow us to transfer the bones somewhere else?

I remember running from the factory to the convent to look for the parish priest that to this day I could still recall his name - Fr. Rapinan. I was told he was out of town. It was two o'clock in the afternoon. I was just going to ask the priest where did they put the bones of my father. Did they keep the for safekeeping somewhere or did they just put them in a garbage bin? When the caretaker of the convent turned his back, I promptly unzipped my short pants and urinated around the porch. It was my first act of social protest!

It would take me years to go back to the fold of the Church. That early, I came to know the difference between the rich and the poor and that oftentimes the Church was on the side of the rich and powerful.

More on this next post.

Women in My Life

For all the women in my life, thank you. On this Happy Women's Day, I wish you all happiness, but there are those who are no longer around. For them, much thanks for the memory and to all, I am sincerely sorry for causing everyone unhappiness at some point in their lives. 

It has been quite a journey, the details of which some of our relatives and close friends know. My father died at the age of 23, and it was my mother and grandmother who brought up my younger sister and myself. My mother and grandmother, we called them Inay Bata and Inay Tanda, respectively, were as expected, a powerful influence in our life.

Inay Bata enslaved herself at the Peter Paul dessicated coconut factory in Candelaria, Quezon, which brought us through the grades until we reached college. Inay Tanda spent a good part of her life working in copra-making facility in our village to add to the family income. My sister postponed schooling, waiting for me to finish college, and when it became obvious it would take probably another lifetime to get myself a college degree, she somehow was able to save money from what Inay Bata was giving her and she managed to get an education degree. She was a teacher when she died at the young age of 33.

Through the turbulent years of my life, these three women all provided support, taking care of my children whose mothers were running lives parallel to mine. They bailed me out with familial sympathy each time a relationship withered and died. I must also thank the mothers of my children for bearing with me in those years I was trying to elude arrest under the Marcos regime, and later, serving time in jail and doing so-called rehabilitation work for a number of years in an office in a park.

Those turbulent years seemed to have scarred me for life and again women with motherly instinct provided the warmth and shelter of home that I could pursue efforts to normalize my life after my sister, Inay Bata and Inay Tanda were all gone.

Again, to the women in my life, thank you for all the caring and the patience. You have been part of the continuing quest to define one's life in terms of some higher and more meaningful purpose.

I know you have defined being happy in this context, too. 

Posted: Friday, 08 March 2013; 12.35 p.m. 

Advocacies

In development work, advocacies abound: poverty reduction; environmental management; gender balance; child rights; human rights; indigenous people's rights; health; natural farming and sustainable agriculture; primary health care and so on down the line. Government agencies, donors and those from civil society institutions (NGOs, academic instititutions, people's organizations, private commercial sector) reflect in their structure and programs their respective program biases and advocacies.

Specialization is the rule. In sectoral fields of growing complexity, such specialized focus is quite important so that key concerns can be addressed with competent skills and interventions. The problem is when such biases filter down to the local level, at government and the community, and the local people are not equipped to handle information from highly specialized sources. Rather than result in a systematic and focused way to address development concerns at local level, there is confusion on which projects to implement in limited time to achieve significant impact.

We have seen this trend in local-level planning and implementation. Local governments and communities grapple with how to integrate all the key messages and information from seemingly competing advocacies promoted by donors, government agencies and non-government groups.

Efforts have been tried over the last two decades or so to address this situation:

-creation of local development councils mandated to prepare local plans and budget;
-policy and administrative support to enable local governments and communities to do participatory planning; prepare a common development profile; and prioritize projects;
-adoption of a program approach to facilitate convergence of services to target communities and households based on a consensus on priority problems to be address;
-imparting of skills to municipal planners to bring about more effective planning at local level;
-synchronization of planning at various levels to encourage the linking of budgetary resources to local plans; and the establishment of a common reporting, monitoring and evaluation system for the entire province.

The gains from these efforts have not been significant over the years due to a number of problems or constraints related to the sectoral orientation of the bureaucracy;  pre-packaging of projects or interventions at national levels without regard to local problems; political interference in the planning and service delivery procedures and processes; and the lack of commitment on the part of policymakers and planners to adhere to integrated planning among the sectors based on the local development situation.

To be sure, a few LGUs have achieved this much sought-after convergence of services among the sectors, LGUs and civil society organizations, as well as the local communities. A case documentation of these successful efforts need to be done to see how to deal with key development stakeholders with varying advocacies at local levels.

Practical and Appropriate Community Development

The country's economists and political leaders, especially those who belong to the Aquino administration, are quite ecstatic about the 6.6% growth of the economy last year. There are those however who think that this is not enough; they say the benefits from this growth do not filter to local communities and needy households. Yesterday, a political leader said many people still depend on loan sharks, those who charge excessive interest, to get funding for their livelihood projects. He said this indicate that so-called economic growth does not translate into actual benefits for the people in local communities.

For his part, Pres. Aquino has taken note of what critics from the Opposition calls "jobless economic growth." The economy may improve but it does not lead to an  increase in job opportunities because the growth is in sectors which do not need significant job creation to grow.  To be sure, the private sector will not create jobs just to be able to provide employment for the poor. Job creation for their part is linked to a company's pursuit of its commercial objective and the Government is expected to formulate policies that will enable participation of the private sector in the initiation and development of businesses which will require more people to get employed.

In a developing country like the Philippines, where population rate outpaces economic growth, no amount of economic growth will be enough to give jobs to all those who are employed and underemployed. Hence, we again fall back to the old realization that to be able to make a dent on poverty, we must not only try to do something about the galloping population rate, but do something about helping people find jobs and for government to improve the outreach of basic services.

For job creation, we need not limit ourselves to the formal sectors. There is a need to go to the informal sectors, the enterprises traditionally engaged in by local communities and households, and try to further scale them up through improved technology, more effective linkage to market, and more efficient production system. Unfortunately, the so-called capacity-building programs undertaken by government agencies do not first look into what are existing in local communities and help develop them. Extension workers and trainers are just so enamored with powerpoint presentations and presenting them as their contents or messages are gospel truths. The training participants who are enticed to attend such training with free food and accommodation learn very little of value from such kind of training.

Delivery of basic services by the government suffer from the same mindless pursuit of ineffective strategies, more of showbiz stuff or "paculo," like enticing people from rural villages to come down to the poblacion or town center to be able to partake of government services. And this is done once a year! In fairness, this is good for awareness building, on making people know which services are available, but such annual activities should not be a substitute for more effective system to deliver services to households who live beyond 7 kilometers from the town center.

We must go back to the old-fashioned community development approach of starting where the people are, improving what they have, and truly building on their existing assets and skills. Specialists are needed to assist government extension staff and NGO fieldworkers on how to do basic social investigation, community diagnosis, mobilization of community volunteers, community organizing work and linking organized communities both for livelihood development and the provision of basic services with a bias to those who are more disadvantaged than others.

Let us go back to the old PACD but rather than have the old much-maligned Presidential Assistant for Community Development, let us all work together for Practical and Appropriate Community Development.
We must go beyond showbiz stuff in dealing with our own people.

Public-Private Partnership as Strategy to Improve Local Governance

For this year's Valentines Day, we visited La Libertad, a village here in Baclayon, Bohol. This time, we did not spend time talking with a neighborhood with pronounced social disparities. We went to the Baclayon Homestead Farm and visited a lake with potential as a good tour destination.

Both could benefit the poor in La Libertad. If developed as a training and demonstration center, the farm owned by the Medfords could be an institutional asset to improve the skills level of farmers in producing organic food products. The Loyola Lake, on  the other hand, could attract local and foreign tourists and stimulate the local economy in the process that will benefit the families who live near the lake and, possibly, all the rest of the households in the village community.

This visit to La Libertad has set me to thinking again about the vast possibilities of using what has been known as the PPP or Public-Private Partnership in developing community assets as part of poverty reduction efforts at municipal or city level. In all my years as development professional which has spanned four decades in several countries in Asia and the Pacific, I believe that the built-in inefficiency of local governments can be upset with the fiscal discipline and business focus that the private sector can bring into projects designed to benefit households and local communities in ways that also earn profit for the investors.

Baclayon offers a great opportunity at this time to demonstrate how the PPP can be made to work to make local governments more effective. Its 5-year Community-Based Eco-cultural Tourism Plan has been approved by the LGU, which has also given the nod to the strategy to involve primarily the private sector in implementing the priority projects identified by the plan.

The private sector in the municipality is fully represented in the newly-organized Baclayon Entrepreneurs Association (BEA) which ensures a mechanism for the the maximum participation of the sector. The management of business firms, such as the Peacock Garden, has shown keen interest in the new concept about the involvement of hotels in community development work as practised by some hotels in Cambodia.

Most of the political leaders have seen the wisdom of having the PPP as a strategy to address problems of inefficiency, lack of motivation, inadequate staff and funding which constitute formidable constraints to effective governance over the years.

Indeed it is time to achieve a breakthrough in governance through adoption of the PPP in the planning and implementation of projects.

Lessons for BLDF

Our last posting was 02 Dec, more than two months ago. I am tempted to say "Sorry to All," but it may not be appropriate. Not too many people visit our BLDF posts and there is no indication from the few who do that they have missed my posts. It will be quite a distraction, if not a source of humor at my expense, if I apologize for something that is not too important anyway to people.

But, still, my apologies to all, more of courtesy, than contrition.

Anyway, two months have passed too quickly. Too many things have absorbed my attention - BLDF-related matters among them. I will deal on what we have gone through regarding BLDF.

First, it has to be stated that unlike most NGOs, BLDF states explicitly in its by-laws that one of its objectives is to work closely with the Provincial Government  or LGUs in initiatives to improve the planning, implementation and monitoring of poverty reduction projects. After ten years, it has persevered in pursuing this objective. We have spent the most part of the period prior to the board meeting in January in doing formal and informal assessment on our experiences regarding this objective.

Among the lessons learned are as follows:

-We need to set a standard of behaviour in working with Government. Most of the time, LGUs and government agencies perceive us to be a charitable organization. Hence, they treat us depending on what they think they can get from us in terms of grants. We need to manage their perception so that they can view us as equal partner in development.

-This microfinance component needs to be studied seriously. We always run into difficulties to the extent that we end up paying for the loans that our clients fail to pay back due to  a variety of reasons. The reports that we read from other sources of microfinance are just too good to be true. They must know something we do not know, although we have done everything according to the book. The inability to pay back loans is influenced by factors beyond the control of any project. Others are either lying or they must be using collection techniques that are not in the books.

-Some people think BLDF is in the business of selling the PDMS software. We have had ten years of field-testing and modifying it with major technical contributions from Tony Irving, a British national initially recruited as VSO. He was the one who designed and developed the software from the time it was still LPRAP to these days of Version 3.0. The PDMS survey methodology and software have been adopted in other municipalities and cities in the Philippines and in a few areas outside the country. Still, people misunderstand us.

-We need more effective means to make people realize BLDF, which owns the copyright to the software, is not selling the software. It only allows clients to use it. The token fee that is paid by clients goes to further developing the software which also benefits them in the end. Again, we must stress this, it's not all a matter of installing the software. Client LGUs need to use or modify the survey based on their situation. There is a whole process involved from the survey to the installation of the software and to the use of the household database in local-level planning.

-During the last ten years, PDMS has been used by several externally-funded projects in Bohol. No project money has been used for the software. Token fees were paid for by the LGUs. While the LGUs pay the reimbursements, a few client LGUs take 1 to 2 years to pay for these fees and reimbursements of survey and data encoding expenses. Hence, this partnership with LGUs regarding the software is more of a financial burden to BLDF.


-In Maa, Davao City, the LPRAP software installed by Tony Irving and his counterpart, Arnold Seloterio, in 2007, is still used to track progress of families living in garbage dumps. All of the families have received assistance from the local parish. Significant gains have been achieved by most of the poorest families to improve their lot. By the time Fr. Cenon left the parish late last year, the use of the LPRAP software has been expanded to five barangays. They are still using the same old software version and those who were trained as field interviewers are now serving as trainers and community organizers to the new volunteers. It shows you do not need the latest software to really track who need assistance most and to see their progress over the years. It shows also we need not confine ourselves to LGUs as partners in the use of a poverty database in pro-poor service delivery.

-Over the years, we have given briefing on PDMS to the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC). Now we hear NAPC is implementing a project in 28 out of 48 LGUs. It is not clear whether its project will involve the use of a poverty software. We have not received word from any of the government partners on whether PDMS will be used in NAPC areas and in the rest of Bohol. DILG and DSWD seem to be promoting their respective survey and software tools for the use of the province. Despite the 10-year history of PDMS use in the province, nobody has contacted BLDF on how PDMS can still be used officially by LGUs. The lesson is for BLDF to look for other partners in the use of its PDMS methodology and software.

-During its last meeting of the Board of Trustees, it was decided that on account of new challenges, another reorganization be undertaken. The Trustees approved in principle the proposal that those above 60 will move to compose the membership of an Advisory Council and the rest to form the nucleus of a new Board and that younger members be invited. This proposal will require further study. Rather than reorganization, what is more important is a harder look at the strategies it has adopted over the years and to decide on its "core business" for the next five years.

These are some of the thinking going on with BLDF as it enters the new year. It will be interesting to exchange notes with other NGOs, on how they have managed to survive, and what is their outlook regarding the future of their own NGO or NGOs in general.

Let's find out what happens next.