CAGAYAN de Oro City Councilor Ian Mark Nacaya is pushing for a Community-Based Monitoring System (CBMS) in the city government to guide the governance and policy-making.
Nacaya, the chairperson of the committee on planning and development, said in 2016, the city council already passed a resolution urging the City Planning Office to align its planning through the CBMS.
“This is a tool that we need because it’s like a survey that will ask all Kagayanons what their needs and priorities are and direct what our programs should be,” he said.
“Every department should identify and allocate its project based on the needs of our people,” he added.
Nacaya said if only the government’s program is angled directly on the needs of the people, “then we won’t waste our resources”.
According to the non-government organizations CBMS Philippines-Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP), CBMS is one of the tools developed in the early 1990s to provide policymakers and program implementers with a good information base for tracking the impacts of macroeconomic reforms and various policy shocks.
The CBMS work in the Philippines evolved after it was observed that there was no disaggregated data then for planning, program formulation, policy impact and poverty monitoring.
The CBMS framework has been adopted by local government units in the Philippines since 2000. Government agencies have recognized the usefulness of CBMS for generating the necessary disaggregated data for various thematic concerns including local planning, grassroots participatory budgeting, and poverty diagnosis, among others.
“If we can gather useful data through CBMS, then we can provide the right appropriation, the right funding for our people,” he said.