Empowering People towards Participatory Poverty-Focused Budgeting

New hope has been recognized by the civil society organizations as they welcomed a pioneering mechanism in crafting the country’s national budget – the Bottom-up Budgeting (BUB) process. The BUB is an innovative approach that encourages active and meaningful citizens’ participation in the planning of and budgeting local poverty reduction programs/projects which address the local needs of poor communities. It was initiated in 609 municipalities in early 2012 for the formulation of the 2013 budget and was expanded to 1,233 municipalities in the last quarter of 2012 for the 2014 budget.

In response to BUB, CODE-NGO implemented the project “Building and Strengthening Local CSO-LGU-NGA Partnerships for Poverty Reduction” with the support of the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC). From June 2012 to April 2013, the project supported the strengthening of local CSO networks in 20 municipalities in Bicol, Caraga and Eastern Visayas. This included 21 training workshops for CSOs on participatory governance and local/national planning and budgeting processes of the government and 72 CSO consultations and CSO-government dialogues at the municipal, regional and national levels on the CSOs’ local poverty reduction action plans. The project mobilized the participation of 483 local CSOs, including 2,909 CSO and basic sector leaders.

The local CSO networks assessed the most pressing causes of poverty in their respective municipalities and cities, identified solutions/projects to address these and advocated with their local governments to include these in the priority projects for the BUB. The project also provided training, tactics and tools for CSO leaders to analyze the causes of poverty in their areas and understand the local and national government planning and budgeting processes so they can meaningfully participate in the BUB processes.

Regional and national consultations among participating CSOs were organized last March to April 2013 to assess the implementation of the project and of BUB 2014. Among the key findings were: lack of synchronization between local budgeting processes and the nationally-initiated BUB-LPRAP; lack of preparedness of many LGUs/NGAs for the BUB-LPRAP; limited avenues for CSO participation in the process as actually implemented and weak technical and lobbying capacities of many CSOs. Based on these, CODE-NGO submitted the following key recommendations, among others, to NAPC, the Departments of Budget and Management (DBM) and Interior and Local Government (DILG) to improve the implementation of the succeeding BUB cycles:

– Ensure the conduct of an inclusive and autonomous CSO assembly in each city/municipality and provide additional funding support to allow for more CSOs to attend these assemblies;
– Focus CSO capacity building on CSO roles in local governance processes and implement joint capacity building sessions of NGAs/LGUs with CSOs on constructive engagement;
– Institutionalize/harmonize BUB 2015 with the local planning and budgeting process; and
– Include in the Joint MC for BUB 2015 the guidelines on coordinated LGU-CSO monitoring and evaluation of BUB projects, and require that BUB projects indicate poverty reduction targets or performance outputs.