BUTUAN CITY – One of the biggest poverty reduction projects of the Philippine government, the Kapit-Bisig Laban sa Kahirapan – Comprehensive and Integrated Delivery of Social Services (Kalahi-CIDSS) will be bringing its war on poverty to this city in early April of this year.
Administered by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), Kalahi-CIDSS is an anti-poverty project using the community-driven development (CDD) approach by empowering ordinary citizens to actively and directly participate in local governance by identifying their own community needs, planning, implementing, and monitoring projects to address local poverty issues collectively.
DSWD Caraga assistant regional director for operations and regional project manager for Kalahi-CIDSS Mita G. Lim said that Butuan City was identified by the national office to pilot test the urban CDD building on the success of the implementation of the project in the rural areas.
Lim added that two barangays, Brgy. Pagatpatan and Brgy. Doongan were identified to receive the grant based on the 2009 National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) survey wherein a considerable number of the poorest households in the city reside.
“One of the biggest lessons from our implementation of Kalahi-CIDSS is that one cannot base development in modernization alone, one must look into the deprivation of the people in terms of their access to basic services such as the presence of health and educational facilities and ownership of assets to allow sustained income out of existing resources in the community,” Lim said.
The urban CDD will be funded by both World Bank for infrastructure projects and the Japanese government through the Japan Social Development Fund (JSDF) for community livelihood projects.
A grant of one million pesos will be allocated to each barangay and an additional Php100,000 will be allotted for community-based implementation support for training and administrative costs.
Moreover, innovations were also integrated to the existing implementing mechanism of Kalahi-CIDSS. DSWD regional director, Dr. Minda B. Brigoli said that for urban CDD, there will be a strong coordination with members of the civil society organizations (CSOs) operating in the city to act as members of the Kalahi-CIDSS technical working group (TWG), facilitators for community volunteers’ capacity building activities, and as independent, third party monitoring groups.
The implementation of Kalahi-CIDSS in Butuan City will see a convergence of the three core social protection programs of DSWD, namely: Pantawid Pamilya, Sustainable Livelihood Program, and Kalahi-CIDSS; inter-agency collaboration and program coordination in urban areas; and national government agency (NGA) – local government unit (LGU) collaboration on technical assistance, resource augmentation, and service delivery in poor urban communities. ### (Social Marketing Unit)
