What’s happening in a Nueva Ecija town by Tonette Orejas

HARVARD TAKES NOTICE By Tonette Orejas
Philippine Daily Inquirer, Central Luzon Desk
First Posted 02:36:00 06/24/2009


MANILA, Philippines--A progressive municipality in Nueva Ecija, whose patron, Saint Isidore, was a farmer like most of its 47,000 people, has gained attention at the prestigious Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government (KSG) in Massachusetts.

“I never thought that the small things that we do in our small town—the things that the ‘great’ leaders of our country take for granted—will be magnified, felt and noticed here in Boston today,” Mayor Sonia Lorenzo of San Isidro in Nueva Ecija said in her presentation on governance and democratic leadership at a KSG conference last week.

The conference mainly tackled the ministry of Gawad Kalinga (GK), a Catholic Church-affiliated group that has helped more than one million Filipinos reach their dreams to own homes and live in peaceful, productive communities.

“What happened in San Isidro went beyond building houses and organizing communities. In our town, we applied in public governance the GK-style of working from the bottom,” she said in an interview by e-mail.

Her speech, “Creating a Culture of Change,” sums up for the first time the steps that local officials and residents have embarked on and hurdled together to take San Isidro out of the rut of traditional politics and really make local government serve the people.

Out of domestic duties

Lorenzo was hardly prepared for public governance. A chemical engineer, she went full-time in rearing four children.

But four days before the 1998 elections, her townmates plucked her out of domestic duties, pleading her to run for mayor when a candidate was disqualified. She won.

But the town was in a financial mess, the municipal employees demoralized and many of the residents distrustful of government.

GK came after a storm devastated the town. “Our partnership opened the gate for social transformation in San Isidro. We learned the effective way of addressing poverty through citizen’s participation. We learned the GK way,” Lorenzo recalled.

By that, she meant making people “co-own the issues and co-create the solutions to come up with a common response in addressing the issues.”

The result, she said, is a guide for “bottom-up governance that now prevails in the town.”

In this leadership style, she said “listening is the foundation to participation because it enabled us to respond to the right problems quickly.”

Their venues were multisectoral planning sessions. Local officials pushed this further by engaging students in doing basic surveys.

“This deepened their understanding of San Isidro; at the same time, it saved us from expensive survey,” she said.

Integrating people is a must.

“We found that when we strengthened the interest groups, we effectively spread the leadership and stewardship of the issues and empowered people who are concerned. In other words, we effectively decentralized governance and let citizens manage some of the response through advocacies and civic initiated projects,” Lorenzo said.

“We integrated the people into the work in order for us to deepen our understanding and make our responses more effective.”

People’s affirmation

It did not stop there. The officials had to ask the residents to validate the programs before actually doing the projects.

They also needed to change how they regard themselves in the change process.

“As we engaged institutions who can help, we went back to the people and slowly defined our accountabilities. We did this in order to ensure the success of the programs and maintain the trust of the funders,” Lorenzo said.

Making the people understand this new way of doing things was difficult. Barangay health workers, the frontline workers, put in the magic.

Trained in leadership and communication, they explained the goals of the local government and the roles of the residents.

Following their own score cards, they enrolled 95 percent of the population in the municipality’s health insurance program. No dole, it required the residents to pay their share of the dues.

“As we launched other programs, we slowly formulated a barangay-based health care system which became the basis for our Client Needs Centered Clinic. We still have a long way, but we have already addressed many pressing issues in health,” she said.

Zero infant mortality

The work is paying off and one of the best results is that, the town had zero infant death in 2008.

“Even with the flaring of dengue epidemic, we have kept the town dengue free last year, as well. And with the inevitable coming of H1N1, we are praying we can respond adequately,” Lorenzo said.

Sustaining the gains is another challenge.

“As much as we scaled down to the barangay, we also scaled up to expand the work. And we found GK to be a great venue for transformative learning. When we ran out of houses to build, we brought GK into the other programs we have. We brought GK to the schools. We brought GK to the work of the parishes. We brought GK to the [people’s organizations],” she said.

She added: “It was a whole new perspective of enabling people [to] participate and gradually making them accountable to the needs of the community.”

Local officials also integrated the GK approach into the curriculum of the College of Immaculate Conception (CIC) so students would learn it, according to Julia Embuscado, a teacher.

Nurturing the enabler

The fifth lesson is nurturing the enabler.

“We encountered many obstacles and resistance. This is when we realized that we needed more people on our side. As we work to build constituencies, we also engaged in leadership training to bring more people to the work,” Lorenzo said.

Ateneo de Manila University and CIC were called in to put together a master’s program for local executives. The 18-month program in public management seeks to enhance technical competencies.

San Isidro, Lorenzo said, has now become a “sanctuary” of engagements for change.

Next month, local officials will launch the Sinag Ecija Leadership and Social Accountability Institute. The institute will house the different initiatives that are ongoing on the ground.

Communities have their own score cards of what they want to attain and how to deliver the targets. Farmers have almost doubled their harvests from 80 cavans of rice to 150 cavans.

San Isidro’s income from taxes has increased by 515.61 percent from 1999 level, prompting the Department of Finance to classify the town into second class (annual income: P45 million-P55 million) from fourth (annual income: P25 million-P35 million).

Better electoral behavior

Citizens’ participation, Lorenzo said, “resulted in trust in governance and better electoral behavior.”

“While we still suffer and struggle through poverty and traditional politics, we present a clear avenue for change that people can follow,” she told participants in the KSG conference.

“We will think of innovative and practical means to preserve this freedom. We will extend ourselves to bridge the democratic gap that our country is now suffering from. We will continue to realize the republic that our country is chartered and not merely as our lawmakers profess. And most importantly, we will continue to integrate the needs of the poor into our policies. This is the ultimate measure of our transparency,” she said.


Filed Under: Elections, Health, Culture (general), Governance