Partido Reporma chairman and standard-bearer Panfilo “Ping” M. Lacson on Monday Nov. 8 said he wants to equip community development leaders with more practical skills and knowledge so they could better prepare themselves in managing and responding to future man-made and natural disasters.
Lacson said this idea was inspired by his experiences when he was tasked to draw up the ‘build back better’ policy of then President Benigno S. Aquino III as his Presidential Assistant for Rehabilitation and Recovery in the aftermath of super typhoon ‘Yolanda’ in 2013.
Speaking at an economic forum less than a couple of weeks ago, Lacson said one of his enduring legacies during his brief stint in the Aquino Cabinet was the transformation of some 161 local government staff into better community planners and developers.
This program was made possible because of the $10-million technical support delivered by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to the Philippine government through its acting administrator Gloria Steele, who was then serving as its mission director.
“They (USAID) provided the matriculation fee, the tuition fee, and we were able to send to the Development Academy of the Philippines (DAP) something like 161 community planners—the local government staff—and 161 of them graduated,” Lacson said.
They now have master’s degrees in planning, development, and so forth and so on. We coursed it through the DAP to the tune of P150,000 per student. So, capacity-building,” the presidential aspirant added.
At least 171 cities and municipalities benefited from that program at the time, according to Lacson, which enabled them to facilitate state-funded post-Yolanda rehabilitation and recovery measures in the affected villages.
“We told them that they should stay in their municipalities for a certain number of years, it’s like a contract. Because the government funded their post-graduate studies, they should serve their communities,” he explained.
The Partido Reporma standard-bearer said similar measures woiuld be part of his devolution programs under his Budget Reform Advocacy for Village Empowerment (BRAVE) policy to accelerate the inclusive economic growth of many underdeveloped communities.
“They should be part, capacity-building (programs). We should encourage our local government units (to participate in those), especially the fifth- and sixth-class municipalities, which are dependent on their internal revenue allotments,” Lacson pointed out.
“We have to capacitate them, so they can be progressive on their own, and not just rely on the national government all the time,” the incumbent senator and presidential candidate said further.
Super Typhoon ‘Yolanda’ struck the Central and Eastern Visayas regions of the Philippines in November 2013, causing widespread agricultural and infrastructure damage, as well as massive loss of lives and families who were sent into deeper levels of poverty.