Development Entrepreneurs

R ecently I had the privilege of watching a Provincial Development Council in session. I wanted to be there because I wanted to see how two resolutions important to a project we were working on would be passed. I had made a mental list of possible problems that could crop up, delay or otherwise block the adoption of the measures we wanted. Before we got to this point our project team had to overcome several hurdles. First of all they had to complete their work, which was all about identification of roads used by different sectors in their respective value chains. They had to hold Focus Group Discussions and Key Informant Interviews to be able to do this. They also had to put together a GIS layer of all roads in the Province, from the big national highways to the smallest barangay roads.  Then they had to convince their own Board about the soundness of their process as well as the correctness of their choices (specific road segments that they believe should be prioritized f...

Because development interventions usually start out as theories these are often implemented on a small, experimental scale - a pilot. As soon as efforts start to show desired results, Development Entrepreneurs start looking for ways to scale up the reform (some leading-edge DEs like Jaime Faustino say reforms, from the beginning, should be scalable). Scaling up means implementing the reforms on a wider scale. In the context of the Philippines, this usually means replicating the pilot nationwide - and often, because pilot projects are necessarily time-bounded, without the continuing intervention and support of a funded proponent. In simpler terms, once you’ve tested and proven that a development reform works in one place, how do you make it happen everywhere else - without being involved in the process anymore?  How do you influence events over space (the rest of the country) and time (after your project funds have run out) so that the reform you’ve introduced spreads? ...

For almost a year now we have been working on enhancing access to credit by land owners. The first question we asked ourselves, land owners, and banks was, “what systemic factors (policies, procedures, etc) prevents land owners from accessing credit?” Answer Number One: most land owners do not have titles to their lands. Many occupants of land have all the prerequisites to legally claim ownership - to get Titles to their land - but have not been able to do so. Many lot owners, local government officials, people’s organizations still do not know about new laws (e.g. RA 10023) and procedures (systematic adjudication, public land titling partnerships between DENR and LGUs) and have not taken advantage of faster, cheaper ways to get titles. Some LGUs that have been introduced to systematic adjudication in the context of LGU-DENR partnership have not continued with their efforts, for a variety of reasons. And even those that have sustained their efforts are now facing a new challenge: dela...

Hernando de Sotto-Soler said that it’s easier for people who have titles to their lands to access credit from banks. This is a better choice than getting credit from informal sources. Banks can give a higher amount, at lesser interest, for a longer repayment period - if the loan is secured by a title. And when people with titles got loans, they would increase the amount of local economic activity - for example, when they use the loan proceeds to open or expand a business, or improve their homes. In a previous project we had been helping people get titles to their lands. So we wondered, are they using their titles to get loans? A rapid check with the LGU Land Information Offices, which were directly involved in the titling process, yielded a negative answer. It turns out people were not using their titles to get loans because, among other things, they didn’t know they could. So we crafted a little theory: if people got more information about how they can use their titles to ge...

In the first three episodes of Star Wars, we see the emergence of an organization that was strong enough, big enough and had sufficient resources to challenge the old Republic. No, I’m not talking about the Sith.  I’m talking about the Trade Federation - a coalition of interstellar businesses that felt the Republic’s policies were getting in the way of their profit-making. Anticipating their conflict with the Republic to escalate, the Trade Federation engaged the services of General Grievous (or built him?), created a robot army (much more efficient, I say, than building a clone army) and blockaded entire planets. They were strong enough to challenge (with the help of some friends in the Sith) depose an existing regime. That must qualify as a kind of reform. But that happened in a galaxy far far away. Closer to home, businessmen’s organizations are not quite as antagonistic - they’re more like gentleman’s clubs, old money and new money coming together to represent the busines...

So a Development Entrepreneur has a theory, and he is doing something to test it. What if the result is negative? It would seem like the theory is wrong. Or maybe there is something wrong with the execution, and if the approach can be refined he would get the desired results (another theory).  So he performs the experiment again, a little bit differently now.   This is called perseverance. What if our Dev Ent has tried several times, and has still not achieved the desired reforms.  If he has done his experiments well, he should have learned something from all of them. After all, each experiment ends with an assessment of what happened and why, and a conclusion about the validity of the hypotheses held at the beginning. Several failures should give our reformist some pretty good ideas about which theories are validated and which are not. Perhaps he will have learned enough to change not only the nuts and bolts of his approach but the whole entire concept of what ...

Reforms are basically desired improvements in the way institutions work. These changes may be formally established through policies and are only actualized by changes in procedures. Now, people make up institutions, policies are established by people, and procedures are carried out by people. So when we talk about reform, we are really talking about changes in people’s behavior.   This suggests a strategy for pursuing reform: seek to influence the behavior of key individuals whose support is needed to carry out the desired changes. Identifying these people is the first challenge. While leaders are obviously involved in most institutional changes, influencers who can help convince the leaders are also important. So are the people who will carry out the leaders’ decisions - including, sometimes most importantly, front-liners whose actual work would be affected by the changes. Systems analysts and software developers, in exploring functional requirements for application softw...

I used to call them “proofs of concept” or “prototypes” - working demonstrations of an idea. Then it was pointed out to me that not all ideas are about delivering an acceptable service, utility or good to a client. Sure, I could make a prototype - but if it was not acceptable to a client - if it did not serve his needs, at least in a small way - it was not a “Minimum Valuable Product “. Looking back at the projects I’ve been involved in, I could cite some pretty good MVPs.  On our Project Land Titling project alone. we had several.  The first MVP we had was a standard training program for systematic adjudication. It built on the ideas of LAMP 2, was delivered by LAMP 2 veterans like then-RTD Dian Apistar and then-PENRO (now RTD for Forestry) Edu Inting (both of DENR VII), and involved local government personnel. Prior to the first ever such training we helped a group of Trainers from DENR VII to write down a standardized training design and a complete set of standardiz...

In our advocacy for titling of public lands a Cadastral Map is essential. This is a map of lot parcels containing such information as the Lot Number and lot boundaries, and associated data about the disposition of each parcel.   This map lets us know which lots can still be covered by RA 10023, the Residential Free Patent Act, and which lots are not covered because they may have been titled already, or there is an existing claim, or there is a dispute over the property.   The problem is that this map is not readily available with Municipal Governments.  DENR holds this data, mostly on paper, and mostly in the form of Lot Data Computations - a table of numbers which can be interpreted to form the polygons of lot parcels. We were challenged to come up with a method to convert these DENR data into maps that can be used both by DENR and LGU personnel. We already knew that officials of DENR VII and of several LGUs in Cebu Province wanted to do something about this. D...

Everything that we see around us today started out as an idea in somebody’s mind - a “theory”. Everyone knew that iron sinks to the bottom of the sea but somebody thought it could be shaped in such a that its buoyancy would be greater than its weight.   And everyone knew nothing heavy could fly - but several people thought that if they could push air to create pressure on the underside of a metal surface, that surface - and anything attached to it - could fly. These theories, however, would have remained ideas only - “imagination”, many would call them - if not for the fact that certain individuals decided to act on them, to test them.  Many of them failed - literature is full of stories about attempts and failures before the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight in Kitty Hawk - but even these failures contributed to eventual success because the experimenters learned something, even if it was only how not to do it. Experiments produced more data and more insights, whic...

More than six months into a project our project team found itself wondering whether we were really headed in the right direction. We thought we were doing well enough until a month ago when we compared notes with another team that was doing a similar project in another Province. We thought they were doing cool things like tackling the challenge (coordinating road investments) at the Provincial level – while we were doing the same thing at the Municipal level. And they were spending a lot of effort crafting a criteria for road investment prioritization while we accepted our Municipality’s road priorities (which we believed to be aligned with their respective strategic directions).  These differences led us to thinking about whether the other team’s initiatives were applicable to us. Moreover we asked ourselves, “why didn’t we think of these things at all?” So we agreed to hunker down and sort these questions out. Nobody was quite sure where to begin, though.  When my bo...

Significant things happened with the way DENR issued titles for public lands over the last two years. First, Secretary Paje issued Department Administrative Order 2011-06. This DAO authorized DENR Regional Directors all over the Philippines to establish partnerships with local governments for public land titling. In this partnership a Cadastral Council would be established to set titling priorities and tackle titling issues. DAO 2011-16 also allowed REDs to deputize local government officials and employees and officials as DPLIs. LGU partners were asked to organize Land Information Offices or Units to support titling activities. This policy was supported by DILG Memorandum Circular 117- 2011 (signed by then-Secretary Jesse Robredo) which encouraged local chief executives to comply with the provisions of DAO 2011-06. At least 105 partnerships have been established between DENR and local governments.  These partnerships were promoted by a USAID supported project by The ...