AN official of the US government cited the Philippines’s transparency programs as crucial in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—a new set of global goals to end poverty and inequality over the next 15 years—saying that Manila’s good-governance approach tackles poverty and inequality.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said achieving the United Nations’ SDGs is central to the Open Government Partnership (OGP) agenda.
She noted that open and transparent government initiatives should ultimately set out to tackle poverty and inequality, citing the Philippines’s Bottom-up Budgeting is a good approach to open government initiative.
“In the Philippines one of OGP’s founding members, the government required grassroots participation in the planning and budgeting of poverty-reduction programs in every one of the country’s 1,634 municipal and provincial governments,” said Power, leader of the US delegation to the OGP summit.
“And that has resulted not only in greater citizen involvement in the creation, implementation and evaluation of programs, meaning that the programs themselves are tailored for the communities rather than invented by some bureaucrat in an office that’s not in touch with what people really need,” she added.
Budget Undersecretary Richard E. Moya led the Philippine delegation to the OGP in Mexico City, along with Philippines Task Force and several representatives of civil society organizations advocating transparency and accountability through open data.
The three-day event that concluded on October 29 came up with a declaration signed by OGP members, including the Philippines, committing to use their participation in OGP to implement the new global goals and to increase the transparency of the resources intended to fight poverty.
Moya said part of the summit agenda is the adoption ceremony of the Philippines’s Open Data Charter, which will take place during the closing plenary session.
The Philippines’s Open Data Charter sets out in detail the guidelines for the implementation of open-data standards in the country.
“The Open Data Charter was developed to help bolster transparency and accountability in government by nurturing an environment of public empowerment. With this charter, the public can hold their government accountable, and broaden their role in their country’s development,” Moya said.
The Philippines is now on its third year of implementation of OGP National Action Plan from 2015 to 2017. The action plan commits the national government, civil society and the private sector to promote transparency and good governance.