Various government agencies in the CALABARZON region are now seeing increased implementation of the interventions included in the Provincial Commodity Investment Plans (PCIPs) of all five provinces in the region.

This is based on the latest encoding session conducted by the National and Local Planning (I-PLAN) Component and the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Unit of the Philippine Rural Development Project (PRDP) on October 15-16, 2019 in Makati City.

“We are holding this kind of activity [encoding sessions] to allow our partners in the provincial government to focus on the encoding of interventions and also provide the answers to their queries,” PRDP CALABARZON M&E Officer, Michael Joe Gonzaga, said.

All provinces from the region were able to send representatives for the said session. The participants came from the offices of Provincial Agriculturists and Provincial Planning and Development which were assisted by the staff from I-PLAN Component and M&E Unit of PRDP CALABARZON and South Luzon Project Support Office.

According to the CALABARZON I-PLAN Component Head, Crystal Jade Padonan, apart from PRDP subprojects, interventions that are funded by different agencies will be encoded in the local government unit (LGU) module lodged in the Project’s website. This will allow the PRDP to evaluate whether the PCIPs are being utilized as intended by the Project.

Variables that the participants have encoded were the project’s name, commodity, cost, stage of implementation

M&E Officer Michael Joe Gonzaga of PRDP CALABARZON reviews the output and identifies issues within the LGU module.

, Value Chain Analysis (VCA) segment (e.g. input supply, extension, policy), and the funding institution.

Based on the latest result from this encoding session, the top three commodities that received non-PRDP interventions are virgin coconut oil, geonet, and dairy milk. In terms of VCA segments, the majority of the interventions from other government agencies and special projects are post-harvest, marketing, and input supply.

On the other hand, the Department of Interior and Local Government provides the biggest chunk of funds. The other biggest contributors are the region’s provincial governments and the Department of Agriculture.

The PLGUs can also encode in the LGU module even in the absence of an encoding session. Through the module, they can also showcase their level of commitment to the priority commodities.  ### (Lawrence Albert Bariring, DA-PRDP CALABARZON RPCO InfoACE Unit)