Community-driven

By Uriel Quilinguing

ANYTHING that gets institutionalized must have been tried and tested, its distinguishing features can withstand the ravages of time, and there’s little or no room for changes. 

Persons who exemplify the ideals of a distinct profession, known crowd-drawing places, or best practices that have become hallmarks of success calls for their adoption, replication, and institutionalization. 

For instance, the community-driven development approach has been proven effective in the conceptualization, planning, implementation and monitoring of anti-poverty projects in the past 16 years now. It is strictly being adhered to in the World Bank and Asian Development Bank-funded Kapit-bisig Laban sa Kahirapan-Comprehensive and Integrated Delivery of Social Services or Kalahi-Cidss projects where the Department of Social Welfare and Development is the lead agency. 

No wonder, there legislative measures in Congress that are seeking the institutionalization of the CDD process not just for DSWD but for all government agencies undertaking anti-poverty projects. These bills are timely since Kalahi-Cidss projects are to be terminated by yearend when the foreign grants for the purpose shall have been exhausted.   

With this in mind, Kalahi-Cidss deputy regional program manager Teofreda B. Dingal’s welcome remarks in a gathering of media practitioners last Nov. 14, 2019, at the Pearlmont Hotel in Cagayan de Oro, dubbed as DSWD Kalahi-Cidss Community-Driven Development Festival, should have been in an upbeat mood. 

Indeed, the activity was supposed to be festive, it being a celebration for the completion of 1,384 projects valued at P2.2-billion in Northern Mindanao for the past 16 years and that the “bayanihan spirit” is still very much alive. 

For this, the CDD planning strategy which delivered the goods must be kept intact, even when Dingal and close to 500 other personnel from the Kalahi-Cidss regional management development office would be jobless by January 2020.

Once institutionalized, CDD will be prescribed and its implementation will be the templates for anti-poverty advocates, sustain the approach through trainers’ training to sustain a pool of experts, and regular source of funding which, by then, must be integrated into the General Appropriations Act. 

Appropriately, CDD should not be in the DSWD domain. It should be the National Economic and Development Authority, the government’s primary planning agency, even if all agencies of government have their respective planning units.  

However, institutionalized CDD may discourage creativity and stifle imagination since stakeholders in the planning process must follow to the letter planning standards set. What worked in the past 16 years may not 50 years from now. 

In the prioritization of identified projects, a formula must be adopted to neutralize personal biases and a set of criteria so that there would basis, should the identified project be contested among the stakeholders. 

MediaKonek believes the community-driven development approach could sustain its relevance since planning is an activity artificial intelligence is least needed. Besides, if the number of Filipinos below the poverty levels would finally be obliterated, then such an anti-poverty strategy would become irrelevant. By then we can say, let’s drink to that! 

(Uriel C. Quilinguing is a former president of the Cagayan de Oro Press Club who, for more than three decades, had been editor in chief of Cagayan de Oro-based newspapers, including this paper. For reactions, email them to uriel.quilinguing@yahoo.com.)