By ROY C. MABASA
April 10, 2011, 6:45pm
Governor Imee Marcos said no other place in the country deserves this honor more than Ilocos Norte because, like many other places in Northern Luzon, the province is completely “remittance-addicted.”
“We’re delighted to have been chosen as part of this, we requested it time and time again. And we’re grateful that we have been obliged,” Marcos said during her speech at the launching of the Overseas Filipinos Remittances for Development (OFs- RED): Building a Future Back Home Project held at the Shangri-la Hotel in Makati City.
The UNDP formally inaugurated last Wednesday the OFs-RED pilot program, which was wholly funded by the Western Union Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Western Union, to pool funds from migrant workers and channel them into projects that lead to economic development and community-based enterprises in the workers’ home communities.
Renaud Meyer, UNDP Country Director in the Philippines, said the project will contribute to speeding up efforts in the Philippines to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in particular, the target to halve poverty by 2015.
Meyer explained that the group will test a mechanism to facilitate and direct overseas remittances towards savings and investment in livelihood improvement and entrepreneurship for the poor and vulnerable, and ultimately create jobs and reduce poverty.
The OFs-RED project, he said, involves six phases. The first phase is “Policy-Making,” which is the assessment and refinement of government policies for the inclusion of collective remittances.
It is followed by “Capacity Assessment or Building,” which is establishing awareness among sender and beneficiaries of the program. The third phase is the “Collective Remittance Model,” which includes the creation of the framework and mechanism of the project.
The next phase is the “Promotion and Mobilization of Funds” phase, where OFWs and their families must be willing to undertake the “interventions” identified in the study.
This is then followed by the “Action Pilot” phase, which is the field testing of the project in two local communities: Ilocos Norte and Taguig City.
The sites were chosen for their openness to the concept of migration and their exposure and experience in migration.
Possible projects to be rolled out in Ilocos Norte are towards the agribusiness, ecotourism and food processing industries.
The last phase is the “Evaluation,” which would assess the final model on how to harness remittances from OFWs and translate them to local development programs before implementing it to other communities.
“We have, perhaps the full spectrum of migrants from Ilocos Norte (all over the world) - from those agricultural workers that populated and migrated to Hawaii and California and also those doctors in Chicago and New York or Bahrain and London,” said the daughter of former President Ferdinand Marcos.
Thereafter of course, the Ilocos Norte chief executive said, the people heard of world-famous Ilocano poet Carlos Bulusan in America, as well as the Alaskan fishermen, the workers in tuna factories and in the shrimp farms in New Orleans – they were all Ilocanos as well.
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