THE MILLENNIUM Development Goals (MDGs) and the Human Development Index (HDI) were both United Nations initiatives.
Comparing the two, it is obvious that HDI would outlast the MDGs, because the goals had 2015 as deadline, whereas HDI appears to be open-ended.
Comparing the two again, I see three common denominators, and I am referring to the measures pertaining to poverty reduction vis-à-vis per capita income, public health vis-à-vis the mortality rate, and general education vis-à-vis the literacy rate.
Analyzing these comparisons, I see yet another common denominator, and that is the degree of access that people have to the relevant public services, and I am referring to access to employment services in order to lower poverty, access to health services in order to lower mortality, and access to education services in order to lower illiteracy.
I mentioned employment services only as a minimum requirement, because on top of that, I think that local governments should also provide entrepreneurship services. That means local governments should also give their citizens access to capital and technology in relation to their income generation goals.
Looking at the positive side, local governments should aim to increase prosperity by reducing poverty, increase longevity by reducing mortality and increase literacy by reducing illiteracy.
To do that, they should know their benchmark data as their starting point, and that means knowing the exact poverty rate, mortality rate and illiteracy rates in their own jurisdictions.
How many officials in the local governments actually know their benchmark data? How many of them would actually know the difference between poverty reduction and poverty alleviation?
The latter does not amount to anything, because it is like reducing the pain without really curing the ailment. Much more than that, how many of them are actually gathering and reporting the MDG data that are needed by the national government to submit to the UN?
I even suspect that the national government is simply fabricating the data that it is reporting to the UN, given the fact that there is hardly any data that is coming from below.
As local administrations come and go, how would the local citizens know if their elected officials were able to deliver the needed public services or not? How would we know the extent of their achievements if there is no common or standard method of rating them or comparing them with each other?
Of course, there is more to local public administration than reducing poverty, mortality and illiteracy, but these are the core problems that are considered to be more important even by the UN.
Time and again, the local administrations that are coming and going would always cite the lack of budgets as the main reason for not being able to deliver the public services as they have promised. We have gone through this routine too many times, and we are about to go through it again as we elect or re-elect the incoming local officials. When is this vicious cycle ever going to end?
After more than one hundred years of being supposedly an independent republic, we should already realize by now that our local governments are partially incapable of delivering the critical public services on their own, without the assistance of the rest of the citizenry.
Many local governments have failed, and many are yet to fail, but we hardly know the extent of their failure, because we are not applying standards to measure their performance.
In fairness to the local civic groups, many of them are doing their part here and there, but since their efforts are largely disconcerted, many of them are not hitting the real targets of reducing poverty, mortality and illiteracy. Is it not time to converge the efforts of the citizenry in combating these three mortal enemies, in tandem with the local governments?
Towards this goal of convergence, I think that the best way to do it is to form local advisory councils in each locality, composed or representatives from the civic groups, including the non-government organizations (NGOs).
I am looking for a locality where this approach could be piloted, and I am going to cover its evolution and progress in my daily business show in nationwide TV. I am fortunate to get the support of the network management in this regard, another sign that this is a good direction to take./PN
