Barangay-based development

NO HOLDS BARRED
Ike Señeres

I am completely overwhelmed by the warm response of online Filipinos to the advocacy of soliciting old computers for distribution to the 42,000 barangay units all over the country. Ms. Elsa Bayani, one of the advocacy leaders says that it is my project, but in all humility I would rather say that I am just a writer, I wrote about it, but it was the people who embraced the idea and who took it as their own.

As it is now, the advocacy is taking off on its own steam, and I am now the one trying to keep up with it. Having managed many other computerization projects before, I have made it my own responsibility to see to it that as this advocacy moves forward, there will always be a good balance between the magic troika of computerization which is the combination of manpower, infrastructure and content (MIC).

Looking back into my previous experiences, I have concluded that in the final analysis, computerization is really just the means to an end, because the real end should be modernization. When I say modernization, I mean the modernization of the means of delivering public services, and not the modernization of the hardware and software that are needed to deliver these services.

Could we possibly solicit, reformat and deliver computers to all the 42,000 barangay units nationwide? I say yes, and that is not even the problem because I know that we could deliver more than one unit to each barangay. The problem, or the challenge I should say is to build the content that would populate these computer systems, knowing already that the manpower component is already “spoken for” so to speak.

What kind of content should go into a barangay database? To answer this question, I want to share with you an idea that we discussed in my TV show today. Why not build a database of the local labor force, so that local employers would be able to recruit workers and employees from within their own local host communities? This would also be good for their bottom line, because it would save them on recruitment costs.

How about a database of local cooperatives and enterprises? This will also enable the local companies to source products and services from their own local host communities. This will be good for both the companies and the communities. The former would not just save on procurement costs; they will also help the local people with their livelihood, in turn increasing the disposable incomes of their own customers. The latter would not only have a ready market for their products and services, they would also build good relations with their corporate guests.

How about a database for monitoring and reporting the local Human Development Index (HDI)? Right now there seems to be no local data about the per capita income, literacy rate and longevity rate. Any local politician that is serious about his job should make it his objective to increase all of these measures during his term. And since the sources of the HDI data should really be barangay based, there is now an opportunity for the city or municipal officials to gather and consolidate these data at their level.

Now that I have the support of the local Linux users groups, I would like to go to the next step of organizing the working committees at the barangay level, the people who will see to it that local databases will be built for their own needs, according to their own determination of needs. As a matter of fact, I would consider it necessary for these local committees to sign Memoranda of Agreements (MOA) with the VPN advocacy group, just to have a legal framework to work on.

At this point, the priority action is to identify the pilot sites, where the volunteers have already come forward, but they must first form the local committees and sign the agreements. It is very important to do the pilots first so that we could find out the kinks, and also fix the bugs if any. After the pilot stage, the next logical step of course is to roll it out nationally.

Can you imagine what would happen if the HDI compliance data would become transparent to the local citizenry? That would mean that they could actually take an active part in governance because the local officials would now become answerable to them, since they would already know what the objective targets of governance would be. It’s about time this would happen.

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