Convergence in delivery of basic services”

BANTAY GOBYERNO
Ramon Ike Villareal Señeres

Convergence is a goal that should not be left to the government to achieve. Given the size of the government bureaucracy and the complexity of the scopes and mandates of its departments, agencies and bureaus, there is objectively a need for the private sector to come in and help in its totality, jointly harnessing all of its components towards the common goal of nation building. In other literature, “national development” is a term that is synonymous to “nation building”. I used to prefer the former term, but I recently realized that “nation building” is a term that is better understood and is more generally accepted by most people.

In order for convergence to be measurable, there has to be a physical setting. The physical setting that I would recommend is the barangay level. In order for it to be measurable, there has to be set standards of measurement, and that is where the physical setting becomes relevant. In the final analysis, there has to be a database that will measure and track the progress of the delivery of services, namely education, employment, energy, entrepreneurship, food, justice, health, mobility, recreation, safety, shelter and water.

There are many ways of defining the components of the private sector. I believe however that the private sector should be also be defined in physical terms meaning the components that could actually participate in the physical delivery of basic services to the barangay level. Given this definition, I believe that the more identifiable components are the business chambers, the civic organizations and the corporate foundations.

In the public sector, the identifiable components are the line departments, the attached agencies and the local governments. In the language of the government, the line bureaus are considered as “organic” and not as “attached”. On the other hand, GOCCs are considered as attached, not unless these are directly under the Office of the President (OP). For purposes of this discussion, the independent commissions may be classified as among the attached agencies.

It is a big challenge to converge the programs and projects of the private sector, but it is an even bigger challenge to converge the programs and projects of the public sector. The biggest challenge of all I think is to bring about the convergence of the public sector and the private sector together as one, moving towards one common direction of nation building at the barangay level.

To add to the dictum that content is king, I say that data is is the determinant. Without good data in the background, there could be no good content. Regardless of their own mandates, all the agencies of government have to produce content both for internal and external purposes. Generally known as “reports”, these are usually translated into final forms such as voice, text or video. The forms could change from one agency to another, but the bottom line is the same, they have to produce the reports, and without good data, they could not produce good reports. This to me is the first point of convergence, to converge the data first.

First things first, there is a need to collect the benchmark data at the barangay level first. The objective of this data gathering stage is find out the present status of the delivery of services at that level, for all the twelve services namely education, employment, energy, entrepreneurship, food, justice, health, mobility, recreation, safety, shelter and water. The method of doing this should be the same, to get the percentage of access to these services, among the households in the target barangay. It is important to note here that the that will be gathered is social in nature, meaning that it should be reflective of the entire household. In other words, it should not be personal in nature, meaning that it should not be based on the individual experiences of the respondents.

The key word of course is “access”, and the question is whether the household has access to each of the twelve services or not. To put it in another way, the question is whether each of these services are within their reach or not. It should be made clear at this point that the focus of the questioning should be on the aspect of “accessibility” or “availability” rather than “affordability” or “ability”. In other words, the intention of the data gathering is to find out whether the households in the target barangay could access each of the twelve services or not, regardless of whether they could afford it or not.

Since “affordability” or “ability” is a function of poverty, there should be follow up questions to find out why the respondents say that they do not have access to certain services. The data derived from these questions will not only give us a reading of how poverty affects accessibility, it will also give us a means to find out what goods and services we should possibly include in, or exclude from the imaginary “basket of goods”, a method that is now being used to measure the incidence of poverty at the household level.

The Corinthian Coffee Clutch (C3) is a weekly forum that I chair, held every Friday at the Elk’s Club inside the Corinthian Plaza Building in Paseo de Roxas, Makati City. In our own small ways, we are working for the convergence of the private sector towards the common goal of nation building. Come and join us.

The author is a broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, political economist and computer technologist. He was formerly Director General of the National Computer Center and Chairman of the National Crime Information System