The RDC VIII Full Council unanimously approved the selection of Presidential Management Staff Undersecretary Ferdinand B. Cui, who hails from Catbalogan City, as the new advisor of the RDC VIII Advisory Committee (AdCom).

The selection is in response to Undersecretary Cui’s discussion on the President’s Governance Agenda Towards Responsive Results Delivery for Juana and Juan de la Cruz during the First Quarter 2017 RDC VIII Full Council Meeting presided by the new RDC VIII Chair, Tacloban City Mayor Cristina G. Romualdez on 22 March 2017.

Undersecretary Cui strongly advocated among the officers and members of the Council to place the people at the center in all its strategies and challenged the Council to transform from a coordinative body to a collaborative and integrative mechanism by adopting the whole-of-government approach.

According to USec Cui, this can be done through integrated governance which should result to the delivery of result outcomes such as poverty alleviation, reduced inequality, and maximized demographic dividend. Inter-agency convergence and national governance and local governance convergence were identified as key factors in achieving integrated governance and can be achieved through the conduct of results-oriented planning, budgeting, implementation and monitoring and evaluation.

USec Cui said that the advocacy stemmed from UNDP’s statement during the joint HDPRC and NEDA-SDC meeting on 05 September 2013 which states that, “The problem is a national organization that is arranged as vertical silos by agency and, within each agency, by program – which is incompatible with the integrated, ecosystem-based governance that local geography demands.”

Understanding that transformation does not happen overnight, the Council invited USec Cui to be included as Advisor of the RDC VIII Advisory Committee, to which USec Cui accepted immediately. The RDC VIII AdCom is scheduled to meet in May 2017.

Jam Colas, DRD, NEDA VIII