The Philippine Open Government Partnership (PH-OGP) Non-government Secretariat lodged at the Caucus of Development NGO Networks (CODE-NGO), in partnership with the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG), the Department of Budget and Management (DBM), and the USAID-Facilitating Public Investment (FPI) Project, conducted the OGP Regional Dialogues in three island regions in November 2018. Dubbed as “Regional Stakeholders Forum on Local Agenda Setting”, the 1-day forum and workshop primarily aims to conduct preliminary consultation for the crafting of the 5^th PH-OGP National Action Plan (NAP) for 2019 – 2021.

The Dialogues were conducted in Subic (Nov. 6), Cebu City (Nov. 9), and Zamboanga City (Nov. 13) and Manila (December 14) were attended by around 565 participants from the non-government sector, that includes civil society organizations, academe, business groups, and public sector unions. The Dialogues also served as venue to update the non-government sector on the status of key OGP commitments, such as the Budget Reform Program of the DBM (particularly on the Annual Cash-Based Appropriation system), Support to Local Government Program of the DILG, the Freedom of Information Program of the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO), the Citizens Participatory Audit of the Commission on Audit (COA). Senior officials from respective government agencies and non-government representatives from the PH-PGP Steering Committee attended all three Dialogues.

A workshop was spearheaded by CODE-NGO which aims to identify priority themes per region that will be proposed to government in the 5^th PH-OGP NAP for 2019-21. The most common themes identified by the regions are citizens/civil society engagement, FOI localization, and disaster risk reduction and management. The 4^th PH-OGP NAP is slated to end in August 2019 and the 5^th PH-OGP NAP will be launched in the 3^rd quarter of 2019.