World Bank lauds anti-poor campaign in RP

Davao City: The World Bank (WB) has rated the antipoverty program in Mindanao as satisfactory. This came after the WB team reported recently here the result of its month-long assessment of the Department of Agriculture’s Mindanao Rural Development Program (DA-MRDP).

DA-MRDP is long-term poverty alleviation program for Mindanao jointly funded by the WB, the national and local governments and the project proponents. It covers 225 of the 420 towns across Mindanao.

The bank said the program has performed well both in terms of achieving its development objectives and its implementation progress.

The evaluation was based on two development objectives: the increase of incomes of the benefited communities; and the institutionalization of a decentralized agriculture and fisheries services delivery mechanism.

WB lead rural development specialist Carolina Geron said although the loan disbursement was slow, significant improvements have been achieved.

“The trajectory of loan disbursement targets is not yet in the path of the catch-up targets they [program management] set earlier but they have implemented various projects that lead to meet the program’s objectives,” Geron said.

“The program has also reported considerable improvements in the physical and financial performance of the project compared to the previous assessment in August 2009,” she added.

Program Director Lealyn Ramos said the good performance of the program can be alluded to the active participation and involvement of the local governments

To date, 164 towns has availed of and benefited from the infrastructure, livelihoods and environment projects of the program.

Now on its third year of implementation, MRDP has accomplished over P131-million worth of agricultural infrastructure of which close to 66 kilometers of farm-to-market roads have been established, 39 linear meters of bridge and four units of potable water systems erected serving over a thousand households.

With the counterpart of beneficiaries, about P87.01 million worth of various agri-based livelihoods were created benefiting mostly women and indigenous peoples and P42 million had been invested for environmental conservation and protection.

Lead implementers

For rural infrastructure, northern Mindanao (Region X) leads the implementation, which has completed projects amounting to P53.15 million, ongoing subpro-jects P58.28 million. The Caraga region (Region XIII) is second having implemented a total of P31.08-million worth of projects. Followed by Regions XII, XI, IX and the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), respectively.

Rural infrastructure implements projects farm-to-market roads, irrigation systems, single lane bridges, and post-harvest facilities.

For the Community Fund for Agricultural Development (CFAD), the livelihood component, ARMM leads in the implementation which utilized 92 percent of its released funds to date, followed by Regions XIII and X both disbursed 75 percent of its released funds. Region 12 comes in fourth and Regions XI and IX were ranked fifth and sixth, respectively.

CFAD employs a community-driven development approach where the peoples organization themselves identify and implement their project with the help of the local governments.

Ramos said while a frontload of investments have been spent, there is still a bulk of funds ready for local units.

“We urge LGUs [local government units] to avail more of the projects under MRDP especially on agricultural infrastructure projects which will pump-prime more income and investments in their locality,” Ramos said.

“We have reaped success from our labor and we expect to deliver more as more projects will be rolled out to the communities,” he added. –Manila Times