Harnessing the Family for the MDGs
Pasay City

The vision of Pasay City is to become “a scenic premier city, thriving with business and economic opportunities, guided by dynamic and efficient local leadership, and a home to self reliant, morally upright people”.

But this is easier said than done. Pasay City is a crowded urban center suffering the effects of rural migration, overcrowding, unemployment, poverty and the lack of means to address these.

Pasay City is the third smallest city in the National Capital Region, covering only 18.5 square kilometers. However, the airport terminals takes 9.5 square kilometers of this land and the reclamation area gets another 4 square kilometres further reducing available space for urban development which means high density living for the city’s more than 600,000 residents.

In Metro Manila, Pasay City has the worst problems associated with the urban poor and solid waste management. At least 18.4% of Manila’s blighted communities are in Pasay. A huge chunk (41%) of the city’s households lives below the poverty line. Of the city’s 201 barangays, 92 are classified as depressed. These areas have a reputation for drugs, prostitution, poverty and lawlessness. Unemployment and underemployment are high.

Through its dynamic new leadership and its effective development partners, Pasay City was able to harness community participation to address these problems. Key to the city’s development strategy is the localization of the MDGs. The local government focused its efforts on the four critical areas of poverty alleviation, education, health and environment. In so doing, Pasay City has effectively laid the ground work for the progressive attainment of the MDGs.

The Family as Key

Anchored in the belief that a strong family unit is the foundation of a prosperous nation, the Pasay City government harnessed the potential of the family in combating poverty.

Together with the BCMP, the city government embarked on an initiative to localize the MDG in every family. The family-based MDG localization approach capitalized on the family as the advocate, promoter, and achiever of MDGs in the community. The city mustered the commitment of 80 thousand households to work towards the achievement of the MDGs.
To facilitate the mobilization all families in Pasay, the eight global MDG statements were translated into simple and easy to understand family-based goals:

For their part, the local government, the business community and the other stakeholders have renewed their commitment to provide the enabling environment that will create programs and projects to facilitate the attainment of MDGs by the families.
In effect, the family-based MDGs serve as the rallying tool that brings all the stakeholders and the local government together to achieve a common goal.

Matching Felt-Needs with Quick Solutions

The city government realized that in order to achieve the MDG targets in every family in every barangay, it needs to gather relevant information on the nature and extent of poverty in the community. To generate the needed information on “who the poor are, where they are and why they are poor,” the city implemented a community-based monitoring system (CBMS) that gauges the living condition of each household in every barangay.

All the households in all the barangays (100% saturation) were surveyed. The data generated from the CBMS provided vital information about the needs and priorities of the city government’s constituents. Solutions in the form of programs and projects as well as service providers (both public and private) were quickly identified for immediate implementation. Project interventions became fact-based and were no longer driven by political whims and ambitions.

The city’s employment generation efforts provides a good example of how the CBMS was used in the formulation of policy. It was learned that Pasay City residents often travel to queue at the City Hall for job placements and referrals. This practice is very costly for the job seeker who has to spend for transportation but whose chances of getting hired is very low—only 10% get employed. The city government, in partnership with the business sector, decided to change strategy and organized job fairs at the barangay level, where applicants are interviewed and hired on the spot. The PESO hiring rate increased to 62%. A skills enhancement program was developed in partnership with TESDA to upgrade the skills of those who were not hired.

The CBMS was instrumental in the enactment of City Ordinance 3522 s-2005, which required all companies within the city limits to hire 60% of their total work force from residents of Pasay City.
CBMS data, which showed that there were 114 OFW dependents in Barangay 179, prompted the creation of the OFW Bayanihan Savings Group in partnership with the Pasay Cooperative Development Office and OWWA. This led to the Groceria Project, a mini-mart owned and operated by active and inactive OFWs and OFW dependents.

Teaching the poor to help themselves

“Teaching the poor to help themselves is our answer to the gargantuan problem of poverty alleviation in our country,” asserted Mayor Peewee Trinidad of Pasay City.

The formula for the Bayanihan Banking Program (BBP) is ingenious in its simplicity: utilize the Filipino tradition of bayanihan (mutual aid) to encourage a pooled savings scheme among urban poor through organized financial centers; provide access to affordable financial services; and, support these efforts by linking the financial centers to cooperatives and national programs that provide ongoing training for livelihood projects.

Under BBP, the LGU provides training and accreditation to volunteer Account Officers (AOs) who set up Financial Centres (FCs) comprised of 20-30 members from depressed barangays. The FC meets once a week to commit savings and learn about synergy towards community development. After a six month gestation period, FC members are able to borrow against the savings of the FC, depending on decisions made by the FC members themselves. After a year in operation the FC should be absorbed by an existing cooperative, or join with other FCs to form new cooperatives. Integration into the cooperatives provides access to livelihood or entrepreneurial training, as well as the chance to convert savings to share capital in the cooperative.

Like micro-finance projects around the world, by accumulating savings and providing access to affordable financial services, the BBP project is helping raise incomes and living standards among the urban poor. It is also proving that the poor can be part of the economic and social growth of a community.
So successful is the project, that the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) have signed a memorandum of understanding with the Pasay City government to replicate the program across the country.

Through the MDGs: Pasay Wins

Pasay’s CBMS, FBI Ex and Family-based MDG Localization programs demonstrate that the potential effect of pooled resources is greater than individual thrust. Pasay calls it “bayanihan.” It is the synergy that translated the MDGs from aspiration to action.

MDG localization is mobilizing the claim holders (families, households) and the duty bearers (government and private sectors) to claim their equal stake to growth and development. For Pasay City, enlisting more families to commit to the MDGs is key to achieving their vision of a strong and prosperous city.