By Zen Trinidad
CALAMBA CITY, Laguna, Jan. 26 (PNA) — Starting today, the City of Calamba is on its way to develop a data portal on the socio-economic status of its population. Close to 500 individuals are undergoing a five-day training on the implementation of the Community Based Monitoring System (CBMS).
Dennis Lanzanas, head of the City Planning and Development Office, said that he had been instructed by Mayor Justin Marc SB Chipeco to come up with the real condition of the city’s population because the mayor “wants to provide services that will tailor fit to the needs of the people down to the village (barangay) level.”
Karla Boholano, the department’s division head on Research and Evaluation, said in an interview by the Philippines News Agency (PNA) that this CBMS is an “effective tool for policy-making, program implementation and monitoring.”
“This is a faster way in collecting information, sorting and storing information using the CBMS application introduced by De La Salle University in Manila unlike in the past where it was paper and pencil activity,” she added.
Boholano also said that this five-day training will involve the date enumerators, field editors and other staff about the CBMS Portal, the questionnaire that were prepared in cooperation with the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG), the City Population Management Office (CPMO) and the City Planning and Development Office (CPDO).
”Using tablets, the questionnaire that is set inside CBMS SCAN will fast-track data collection and processing by encoding data while interviewing household respondents,” Boholano explained. “Location of the household will also be taken at the same time by getting the Global Positioning System (GPS) data using Android tablets with the assurance of confidentiality of information while facilitating census management.”
”After this five-day training.” Boholano said, “the field interviewers will now go to every household in every village (barangay) for a period of two months so that within the year we can see the overall data of the city population.”
“This is not a random sampling method of interview but door-to-door or per household so we expect 100 percent data inputs,” she said further.
DILG City Director Lenie Bautista said that the “focal speakers of the seminar are DILG personnel in the Calabarzon and her office coordinates with the 54 villages (barangays) comprising the city.” “The output of this activity can be used also by the village level in their planning, implementing and monitoring various programs for their respective places.”
”This (CBMS) can also be of use in ascertaining poverty levels, gender equity and even in risk reduction and management where early warning signs can be elicited,” Bautista said. “This is a very important tool that every village chief should appreciate.”
Meanwhile, Amor Layao, head of the City Population Management Office welcomed the project since the data her office can present is “still based from the Philippine Statistics Administration (PSA) –which used to be the National Statistics Office (NSO)-of 2010.” In the data, the population of the city in 2010 was 480,693 and using “projection method”, by 2015 the population would be 628,546. She said that we also have to “consider migrations from other places living now in the city.” (PNA)