So much has happened this first week…but let’s start with some more info about the internship…the actual reason why I am here.
I will be doing an internship with CPaG (Center for Participatory Governance), founded in 1999. They describe themselves as a social development NGO engaged in democratic participation in local governance and active citizenship initiatives. Ahaaa :) They are promoting active citizenship and democratic leadership in the Barangays in Cebu-City and outside the city. What is a Barangay? A barangay is the smallest unit of local government. You can compare i
t to cities in Belgium. Each Barangay has a chief who’s elected every three years. In Cebu-City there are 79 barangays. As CpaG is a very small organization (6 staff members) they don’t operate in every barangay (no they are active in about 10 ). The criterias they use for starting a partnership with a barangay are mostly about how poor the barangay is and how open the chief is to the program CPaG offers. CPaG works on two levels: elected officials and citizens. By training sessions (participatory planning) they want to enhance good governance and empower citizens. They also focus on women and youth in governance.
t to cities in Belgium. Each Barangay has a chief who’s elected every three years. In Cebu-City there are 79 barangays. As CpaG is a very small organization (6 staff members) they don’t operate in every barangay (no they are active in about 10 ). The criterias they use for starting a partnership with a barangay are mostly about how poor the barangay is and how open the chief is to the program CPaG offers. CPaG works on two levels: elected officials and citizens. By training sessions (participatory planning) they want to enhance good governance and empower citizens. They also focus on women and youth in governance. What have I been doing the past week…I have attended some presentations and a training day. If a barangay might be interested in starting an partnership with CPaG, they go present themselves and they go explain the way of working. Later on a three day training session is planned. During these training sessions, they train local people to become facilitators in the barangay. These people become “responsible” for the development of the barangay and try to reach as many people as possible within the barangay. By training local people CPaG wants to make sure that their development cooperation is sustainable and that the development isn’t imposed from the top.
During the training day I attended the facilitators were taught how to use different tools (venn diagram, pie chart,…) to present data on the barangay (fe. Employment, funds, youth in school, social services,…). Later on they were also taught how to use the problem tree to be able to identify the problems in the barangay and to find efficient solutions. Although I couldn’t understand most of what was said, I still found it quite interesting. We have learned about these tools and the famous problem tree in different courses and it was nice to see that they are really used and to see how they are used.
Anyways this first internship week was more about observation and getting to know the organization and the city and how everything works…Knowing how everything works is something that will definitely take more time than a week. There are so many organizations active in Cebu and CPaG is working together with several ones. However I still don’t get the whole structure :). Right now CPaG is also active in promoting candidates for counselor for the next city elections (2010).
It’s all still quite confusing and chaotic, I hope that I soon will get the whole picture :).
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