Welcome Address by Claudia Buentjen, Principal Country Specialist, ADB-Philippine Country Office (PhCO) at the Post Evaluation Seminar on National Budget Circular 532: Technical Assistance on Harmonization and Development Effectiveness (TA 7190 PHI)
Undersecretary Laura Pascua, Assistant Secretary Gil Montalbo, Department of Budget and Management (DBM) Directors and Personnel, our partners from the AusAID Public Financial Management Program (PFMP) Team, Guests, other participants. Good morning. Magandang Umaga and Happy Easter.
I am very pleased to welcome you all to this seminar which is intended to provide an opportunity to review and share the lessons learnt gained in the process of recent updating of the Organizational Performance Indicator Framework (OPIF) submissions of national agencies to meet the requirements of the National Budget Circular (NBC) 532 issued in 2011. This is an important exercise as it will contribute to the preparation of a much more transparent performance-based budget for 2014.
ADB has supported DBM with regard to OPIF at several occasions during the past 10 years. The support we are reviewing today began in October 2012 under the ADB Technical Assistance on Harmonization and Development Effectiveness. The project, which unfortunately ends on 30 April, aims at implementing development effectiveness commitments included in international agreements such as the Paris Declaration, Accra Agenda Action and the most recent, the Busan Partnership for Development Effectiveness.
There is wide agreement that strengthening efforts to achieve concrete and sustainable results is critical to development effectiveness and ultimately service delivery to citizens. However, only very few countries have made solid progress in this area, and the Philippines is ahead of many other countries in the region. I have always been a strong believer in OPIF, because discussions around the budget are a very good starting point for performance discussions.
I am very pleased that OPIF gained a lot of traction recently when the government adopted it as the framework for the performance-based initiative system for government employees under AO 80 of 2012. OPIF also served as the framework in creating the inter-agency task force in harmonizing the government’s performance reporting system under AO 25 of 2011. Both of these initiatives send a clear signal to national government agencies to shift towards a results-based culture. Introducing a results-based culture involves managing for results, monitoring, evaluating and communicating progress.
The amount of hard work and commitment needed to come to an agreement on the expected results and how they would be monitored should not be underestimated. The review process of NBC submissions or OPIF results frameworks was quite intense, including 16-hour sessions and weekend work. This process will need to be continued in the coming years to become part of regular work processes. We hope that this workshop will contribute to this by bringing out lessons learnt and recommendations.
In particular, government officials in DBM Operations Bureaus will need to be willing and equipped to ask hard questions on the results achieved by various agencies with the government budget allocated to them and draw the necessary conclusions for next year’s budget allocation.
To assess the degree of achievement it will be important that performance indicator and reporting systems are established so that the agreed results can be regularly monitored and reported. For that reason, ADB has recently extended its support to OPIF by including a component on setting up performance indicator systems. However, this work is in early stages and support will need to be continued beyond the life of the Harmonization TA.
I am, therefore very happy that the AusAID PFMP Team, working with DBM, is also supporting the OPIF initiative by making sure that the MFOs, PIs and PAPs are being embedded into the computer systems at DBM. As such, the tools for performance-based budgeting are being integrated into the budget preparation process as well as into the subsequent data generation and performance assessment of Departments.
I would like to extend my congratulations to DBM officials and DBM personnel for the efforts and time in further strengthening the OPIF. I would also like to thank USec Pascua and ASec Montalbo for their excellent leadership, the consultant team for their very hard work and dedication, and the PFMP team for the excellent collaboration. ADB is proud and thankful for the opportunity of supporting DBM in the review of the OPIF under NBC 532 and in laying a firm groundwork for a sustainable results-based management framework for good governance in the Philippines.
Thank you and good morning.