Case-study Barangay Ermita

Of course I am still in Cebu for an internship…
The next month I will be doing a case-study on economic enterprise in Barangay Ermita.

Each Barangay receives money from the national government to fund the expenses in the Barangay, but this isn’t always enough to cover all the public services needed to develop the barnagay. That is why Barangay Ermita created an own fund, an own way to earn money. It uses this fund to give more and better public services (such as garbage collecting, street cleaning,…). This makes the Barangay less dependent of the higher governments and more self-reliant.

As this is a very interesting project, CPaG wants to learn more about it and in the end they want to present this possibility to other Barangays so they can do the same and offer more public services. So my task is to find out how this works, where the idea came from, if it is legal, … .

I have time until the end of April (of which one week holiday) to conduct this study and this is no ordinary literature study. I have to do some interviews with people in the Barangay, which makes me very dependent of my co-workers to help me find the key persons and contact them.
This week I had an interview with the secretary of the Barangay and the Captain of the Barangay. I got a bit wiser, but real good information I didn’t get. They talk a lot, but never really gave me accurate information. And of course the captain talked a lot about how good he is for the people and about the struggles he had with the city government, who’s that’s against this project. I’ll definitely need to go back. (as the interview with the captain was also ended early, other people were waiting) I think it is very interesting and I am eager to find out more about this program.