SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

NO HOLDS BARRED (033 September 26, 2009
By Ike Señeres

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Sustainable development is a very complex process, but at the very root of this process is environmental management which is the most basic of all. It is very important for all of us, including our government officials to first understand that sustainable is a PROCESS meaning that it is a complete supply chain that has to be managed and secured from beginning to end.

It is also very important for us to understand that environmental management is also a PROCESS that should be coordinated and integrated, meaning that it should not be addressed as fragmented pieces, not as single parts of a whole, but also as a complete supply chain, encompassing all aspects of the environment, including the weather which is also the most basic of all.

For so many years now, I have always believed that the name and the structure of the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC) erroneous and defective, and it is a good time now to again review and correct whatever is wrong with it. In this connection, let me say that the name and structure of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) is in the right place, more so now that it has been placed under the supervision of the Department of Homeland Security.

Let me start by saying that in many advanced countries, emergency management is a private sector function meaning that it is civilian led, even if it would always involve the participation of military units, as a matter of course. Here in the Philippines, the NDCC is chaired by the Secretary of National Defense, which is perhaps the reason why we are misled into thinking that our emergency management is civilian led, even if it is really not the case more often than not.

Perhaps the findings are not yet conclusive, but I would not hesitate to say that the density of the rainfall that caused the recent floods is already an effect of climate change on one hand, and of global warming on the other hand. Having said this, I could argue that climate change preparedness should be treated like one part of the complete supply chain or PROCESS that should also include disaster preparedness.

It is already a known fact nowadays that the Philippine Air Force and the Philippine Navy do not have the aircraft and the vessels needed for our air and sea defense, how much more for rescue purposes. On the other hand, it is also a known fact that there are more civilian aircraft and vessels that our military forces have on hand. Knowing this, is this not enough reason for us to realize that our emergency management should really become civilian led? How and when are we going to move towards this direction?

Perhaps it is just a matter of semantics, but it is really wrong to say that disasters could be “coordinated” so to speak. The more appropriate term if ever should be “disaster mitigation”, but even that is too limiting and too reactionary, considering that “disaster preparedness” should really be the more proactive and more forward looking terminology.

As expected, illegal logging and drainage clogging are again being blamed for the onset of the floods. While these two causes might be partially the culprits for the flooding, the problem of flooding is actually caused by more reasons, given the fact that there is really a supply chain that also complicates this problem, being also a PROCESS that builds up towards the complication of this disaster.

Also as expected, our local and national officials are taking the high profile in showing to voters how active they are in giving help to the disaster victims. That is a good thing for them to do, and we are thankful to them for what they are doing, but how many of them would actually work on the long term solutions long after the short term publicity value of this flood is gone?

Going back to the subject of my earlier column, when is our national leadership going to revisit Agenda 21, our long term agenda for sustainable national development? When are our national leaders going to realize that short term natural disasters are directly related to long term sustainability?

In the days to come, we will read in the newspapers how much damage the floods have inflicted to our national productivity. I hope that these statistics would be a wake up call to all of us, to start thinking long term for good.

Watch my TV show “Bears & Bulls”, a daily coverage of the Philippine Stock Exchange. 9:00 am to 1:00 pm in Global News Network. Email iseneres@yahoo.com or text +639293605140 for local cable listings.

A PEOPLE’S PLATFORM

NO HOLDS BARRED (032) September 18, 2009
By Ike Señeres

A PEOPLE’S PLATFORM

The initiative to hold people’s primaries is a good idea, but what is yet another good idea is to complement it with a people’s platform that will be the basis for choosing candidates that the people could support. The good news is, we do not have to crack our brains for new ideas because the ideal people’s platform already exists, and it is already contained in Agenda 21, the national agenda for sustainable development for the 21st century.

First things first- Agenda 21 might have been a product of government processes, but it is an agenda that now belongs to the people, because it has already been affirmed by the Congress that represents the will of the people. Having clarified that, it is no longer a question of whether the people should support it or not, because that is no longer debatable. The issue now is whether we are going to implement it or not, whether we are going to just let it rot as a paper document or not.

Agenda 21 is a well written and is a well thought of document. In a manner of speaking, it is a good showcase of how good we are in expressing ourselves in written English. The only remaining question now is whether or not we will also become good in making it happen, because talk is one thing because talk is cheap. Talk is easy, but what is hard is to stop talking and to start acting.

Looking back at the background of Agenda 21, it is the local manifestation of international agreements reached in Rio de Janeiro, meaning that it is not just our own national will that is at stake here, it is also our place in the community of nations that is at stake. We said yes to the rest of the world, so there is no more excuse for us to get out of our global commitments no matter what local difficulties we are going to have.

Talking about international commitments, it seems that we as a nation is not doing too well in our commitments to the United Nations, in terms of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Human Development Index (HDI). This could actually be a source of collective national shame, if only we could realize the gravity of our collective national failure.

I am willing to risk my reputation as a writer to say outright that our present national system of reporting our MDG compliance to the United Nations is not honest and neither is it transparent. As far as I know, all member countries of the United Nations are supposed to report actual empirical data that are collected from below, from the local city and municipal data sets, and we do not seem to be doing that.

Granting for the sake of argument that Agenda 21 is too broad of a document to be used as a people’s platform, we could nonetheless argue that those who are seeking the vote of the people for local and national positions should base their campaign promises on the delivery of MDGs, which are really nothing more that the internationally accepted means of measuring the delivery of basic services at the local and the national levels.

In the absence of any other empirical means of measuring the success or failure of local and national governance, we should just turn to the global measures set by the HDI method, namely the measurement of the per capita income, the literacy rate and the mortality rate. Simply put, the per capita income is a good means of measuring the poverty rate, the literacy rate is a good means of measuring the delivery of education services, and the mortality rate is a good means of measuring the delivery of health services.

For the record, not all of the Regional Development Councils (RDCs) are meeting regularly and religiously as mandated by the law. This gives us the clue that the MDG compliance reports of the national government are probably just fabricated figures, because the data from below should have been validated by the RDCs, if only they are really meeting as they are supposed to be.

As we start to choose the candidates that we will vote for, we should start asking them how they are going to implement Agenda 21 if they are elected, and how they are going to comply with our local and national MDG commitments, as well as how they are going to increase or lower the local and national HDI measures as the case may be. Truth to tell, promises of delivering livelihood would only address a means to an end, because in the final reckoning, it is the increase in the per capita income that matters most.

Watch my TV show “Bears & Bulls”, a daily coverage of the Philippine Stock Exchange. 9:00 am to 1:00 pm in Global News Network. Email iseneres@yahoo.com or text +639293605140 for local cable listings.

FROM POVERTY TO PROSPERITY

NO HOLDS BARRED (030) September 11, 2009
By Ike Señeres

FROM POVERTY TO PROSPERITY

Historically, 9-11 is supposed to commemorate a day of destruction, but the heavens must have been smiling at me today, because it is on this day that I was finally able to complete my unified system of providing assistance to those who would like to go to school, go to work, or go into business. I have long been working on this 3-in-1 combination, and now it is finally done and is ready to go.

Starting with Informatics, Datamax and the Philippine School of Business Administration (PSBA), anyone could now take any course in any campus of these schools, without paying any tuition or any other fees at school openings, provided that they pass the entrance exams, and provided further that they will join either our entrepreneurship program or our employment program, or both as the case may be. This is like a “Study Now, Pay Later Plan”, with the University Consortium acting as the guarantor.

As a result of a joint venture agreement between my TV shows and Job1 Global, Inc., anyone can now go to work, or I should say look for work in a much more organized manner. Through a unique combination of an online portal and a professional skills assessment system, job seekers will now have a chance of being hired by employers who will search for them in the portal, and who will evaluate their assessment results.

In cooperation with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), I am now in a position to refer any small and medium enterprise (SME) to the nearest and most appropriate microfinance lending agency (MLA). Of course it would take more than financing to go into business, but it is certainly a good starting point, since the training and marketing components are much easier to deliver thereafter.

There is a common denominator in this 3-in-1 combination, and that is the good news of being able to remove the barriers that would prevent people from moving on with the improvement of their lives. To be more specific, I have removed the barriers to education, employment and entrepreneurship. It is now possible for our people to move on from poverty to prosperity.

Is it possible for anyone to avail of all three elements in the combination? The answer is yes, because a student who goes to school could also be a working student, and could also go into business as an entrepreneur. The answer is really yes, because all the barriers to these three pathways out of poverty have already been removed.

So far, six companies have agreed to support our education program. All of these companies have agreed to train and manage the students who will be selling their products in order to earn money to pay for their tuitions. Three of these companies have agreed to supply their products to the students on a consignment basis, thus eliminating the need for working capital. I will name these companies in my future columns.

Assessment is a very important component of our employment program. The results of the assessments will dictate what is going to go into the records of the job applicants in the online portal. I am hoping that some local government units (LGUs) and some non-government organizations (NGOs) could be convinced to sponsor the assessment costs. Hopefully, this could become part of their employment placement programs.

Since anyone could take up any course in any of the participating schools, some of the job applicants who are not so marketable given their present skills might want to go back to school to get a second degree. This might even be double good for them, because they might end up with a good product to sell, a product that could give them a good income already even if they could not get a full time job.

The other projects or activities that I have announced in this column are still ongoing. Overseas groups are still soliciting for used computers that will be reformatted and distributed to the barangay units. Our compatriots here and abroad could now also donate 60 dollars to any beneficiary who will be given 100 square meters of land to plant sweet potato, along with the other inputs such as training, spuds and fertilizers.

The enemy is poverty, but we have now cornered the enemy into a position of weakness. Let us now give a chance to others to be freed from poverty.

Watch my TV show “Bears & Bulls”, a daily coverage of the Philippine Stock Exchange. 9:00 am to 1:00 pm in Global News Network. Email iseneres@yahoo.com or text +639293605140 for local cable listings.

A NATION OF ENTERPRENEURS

NO HOLDS BARRED (030) September 5, 2009
By Ike Señeres

A NATION OF ENTERPRENEURS

It is difficult to establish as connection between corruption and poverty and perhaps it is easier to establish a connection between poverty and prosperity. Having said that I would venture to say that with lesser poverty in this country, there would perhaps be lesser corruption. More so now that the evil of corruption has penetrated into the private sector, and is no longer the solo domain of the public sector.

In a nation where spiraling costs of living is the norm amidst more or less flat incomes, there is no other way for our people to earn more incomes other than entrepreneurship, removing the option of corruption because after all, we have to assume that given the opportunity, the majority of our people would opt for an honest means of income.

It is a sad reality that in a nation with vast natural and human resources, we are awash with poverty, even if we are surrounded by many opportunities to create more value added and to increase our national productivity. Of course, we have many big companies foreign and local that are producing and creating new value added, but for the most part, there are not enough small companies that are doing so.

I received a good suggestion from a computer expert that if we could really solicit old computers from abroad for distribution to needy beneficiaries here, we should include entrepreneurs in our distribution list, and not just the barangay governments and the public centers for delivering basic services. I think that this is a good suggestion, thinking as well that there is always a way to balance our distribution priorities.

Whether we distribute the computers to small business owners or distribute them to public centers where everyone could have access to them, the bottom line issue or opportunity is to enable local villages to connect to the Internet, so that they could expand their markets using electronic commerce, selling either to local or global customers.

I also received another suggestion from the same expert that we should not only think of computers in giving access to small business owners, we should also think of providing more mobile access, reminding me that a cell phone is actually a computer that is in the hands of more people and is therefore more pervasive so to speak.

Come to think of it, we do have the opportunity of creating local networks that are of course computer based, but are accessible as well by mobile phones, using only simple text messages for data entry and query purposes. This does not need hi-tech mobile software, because even the so called Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) sites did not become popular, being too hi-tech for most people perhaps.

Even if our country is known to be the text messaging capital of the world, there are not too many mobile software applications that would cater to the needs of ordinary cell phone users for business support services. In the history of technology use, we have seen that the point of reckoning always is the availability of devices to more users, and that is precisely the advantage of mobile phones nowadays.

On the brighter side, the popularity of mobile phones has caused the more widespread availability of wireless Internet access even in the remote places that have no local Internet Service Providers (ISP). What this means is that even the more distant barangay units could now connect to the Internet, the only problem remaining is the cost of access which could be addressed another way.

Going back to my original topic, we should really find more ways to give more opportunities to more people to become entrepreneurs, giving them as well the tools to succeed in their business, whether these are desktops, laptops of handheld mobile phones.

Much more thinking has to go into the challenge of giving more electronic access to more people. What we know for now is that for as long as we give them the tools, they will find their own ways to succeed in what they will do. Meanwhile, what is important is to gather the enablers in the local places who could be of assistance to the prospective users of the refurbished computers that will be distributed to the barangay units.

Watch my TV show “Bears & Bulls”, a daily coverage of the Philippine Stock Exchange. 9:00 am to 1:00 pm in Global News Network. Email iseneres@yahoo.com or text +639293605140 for local cable listings.