The Union of Local Authorities of the Philippines (ULAP), in partnership with Making All Voice Count (MAVC) and HIVOS International, conducted a Negotiations and Communications, and Data Interpretation and Management Workshop for the “Developing technology-based innovation platforms at provincial level: Supporting Bottom Up Budgeting (BuB) projects for 2015 in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao to identify context specific tech-based innovations to support with making the BuB reporting and monitoring more feasible and information accessible to civil society organizations, provincial government and communities at large” on February 17-19, 2016 at Cebu Parklane International Hotel, Cebu City.
ULAP Plans, Projects and Policies Manager, Crystal Eunice Dela Cruz together with Technical Officer Leolaida Aragan and Project Officer Irish Generoso welcomed the participants from the Municipalities of San Remigio and Tudela and the Province of Cebu. Ms. Dela Cruz started by briefly describing the current BuB monitoring and reporting mechanism. She also gave an overview of the project and previously implemented activities to level off all the participants.
ULAP Executive Director Czarina Medina-Guce served as resource person for the Negotiations and Communications Workshop held in the afternoon of February 17. The session started off with a role playing game simulating a situation requiring communication and negotiation between 2 groups. A short discussion followed as the simulation was processed by the speaker. The session ended with another simulation, this time requiring negotiation between 7 groups with different advocacies and agenda. The processing of the simulated negotiation was a free flowing discussion of learnings from the entire workshop.
Day 2 of the event on Data Interpretation and Management was facilitated by Department of Budget and Management – Open Data Philippines, Data Lead Miss Gianne Gaoiran. Ms. Gaoiran began with a short lecture followed by a simulation requiring participants to process data and present to their boss for action.
The workshop was designed to develop the skills of both representatives from Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and Local Government Units (LGUs) on negotiations and communications, & data interpretation and management. The need for these trainings were identified during the design thinking workshop and monitoring visit of the ULAP project team to the project site. The improved capacity to negotiate and interpret data is in preparation of the upcoming prototype testing for the BuB 911 hotline prototype which aims to improve BuB reporting and reporting through the province as info-mediating platform.
Pretests and post tests were conducted, which were categorized based on familiarity per subtopic and session. The evaluation had a range of 1 to 5 with 5 being ‘extremely confident’ and 1 being ‘least confident’. Results showed that more participants became more confident on the topics after the training. Pretest for both workshops ranged between 2-5. Posttest for the negotiation workshop registered an increased score range between 3-5. The data interpretation workshop post test, though with scores still ranging between 2-4, showed an increased number of participants rating themselves a 3 or 4.