DILG shares online portal for

Civic infra project monitoring

TAGBILARAN CITY, Bohol (PIA)—In the advent of communities getting vocal against government funded and yet sub-standard projects, the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) is opening up a venue for transparency and citizens participation in the monitoring of government-bankrolled infrastructure.

Newly installed Bohol DILG provincial Director Johnjoan Mende, guesting the Kapihan sa PIA introduced the SubayBAYAN, an institutional mechanism that opens up citizen participation in looking into the implementation of government funded projects for transparency, accountability in infrastructure governance.

Not a new project because it has its roots from the Bottom-up-Budgeting days, subayBAYAN is a re-entry plan of a DILG scholar in Australia, adopted nationally for monitoring project implementation, Director Mende started.

It’s an online portal where our people, other stakeholders like the local government unit and the basic citizenry can peek into the status of project implementation for locally funded projects like the Financial Assistance to LGUS-FALGU, which is a financial facility of the Department of Budget and Management which LGUS can access for their identified projects.

“Lately, we also added in the SubayBAYAN, Growth and Equity funds, or those projects funded to balance the distribution of resources to low income LGUS, as an effect of the decentralization as mandated by the Local Government Code, he explained.

And then the DILG also added in the monitoring, the infrastructure projects, funded by the 20% development fund of the LGUS.

“These are the projects that are mandated to be enrolled in the system but the intention really is institutionalizing the project monitoring in LGUS. Hopefully, our dream is to set up all monitoring system of all government projects, as we are starting now,” PD Mende said.

The DILG, also admitted however that despite the time that the mechanism was set up, there are but still few projects that LGUS have enrolled in the website.

“People may not know that we have this website. Actually this is accessible to anyone, anywhere, as long as you open: subayBAYAN.dilg.gov.ph,” shares DILG Local Government Operations Officer Erica Nicole Corona.

To this, the newly installed DILG Bohol to official agrees.

“We may have been wanting in advocacy, as we see, even LGUs are not keen in using the platform,” PD Mende added.

In essence, LGUS which have identified priority infrastructure projects for national government funding, uploads these projects to the DBM portal.

The DBM keeps an open portal for project proposals in the Digital Requests Submission for Local Government Support Fund (DRSL), where the budget agency evaluates the projects and agrees to fund them.

As soon as the projects get the DBM funding, the government agency notifies the LGUs concerned in a Notice of Authority to Debit Account Issued, as soon as the project funds are downloaded to the LGUS.

This also officially allows the LGUS to encode the project to the SubayBAYAN system within 15 days, inputs its progress in the implementation and puts in the proper documents for real-time monitoring.

This also incidentally tags the DILG to set up its technical assistance and project monitoring mandate.

For citizens monitoring, all you need is a facebook account and you can start making a comment (PIABohol)

A FACEBOOK ACCOUNT. A facebook account is enough for a citizen to participate in the monitoring: from there, he can comment or report any infrastructure project that is presented in the subayBAYAN portal of the DILG, says PD Johnjoan Mende at the Kapihan sa PIA. (PIABohol