BAGUIO CITY – Mayor Mauricio G. Domogan said abolishing the Bottom Up Budgeting (BUB) program next year by the Department of Budget and Management (DBM is not a wise approach in dealing with effective government programs.
He recommended, instead, relevant government agencies improve the selection criteria for the beneficiaries in rural and urban areas considering that there are also poor households in the urban and heavily populated areas.
The BUB is a good program but the selection criteria for beneficiaries needs to be clarified and improved to target the actual needy to receive proper intervention direct fromfunds of government agencies earmarked for projects in the different barangays, Domogan stressed.
The city mayor pointed out that the impression that there are no poor households in the urban centers is totally wrong because poor households from rural areas flock to urban areas to look for livelihood and if they could not find decent sources of income, then they become part of the urban poor.
According to him, it is difficult to conceptualize a good poverty alleviation program that will benefit poor households so it is better for government agencies to review the policies that did not work and improve them instead of totally abolishing a program that has been beneficial to thousands of poor households over the past several years.
He claimed that there is a problem in the selection criteria for the beneficiaries of the various anti-poverty programs of the different agencies and it would be best for the implementing agencies to patch up the loopholes of their programs to benefit more poor households as the closing down ofsuch programs runs counter-productive to the efforts of government to curb extreme poverty in the countryside.
Various government agencies had been implementing BUB projects aligned with skills development for deserving individuals to enable them to independently earn a living, reforestation activities to help bring back the green in barren mountains, training of poor households for micro businesses, provision of equipment for identified livelihood projects of different associations, among others, that improve the life of the identified poor beneficiaries of intervention programs of the concerned agencies./By Dexter A. See
