BAGUIO CITY – The Cordillera Regional Development Council (RDC-CAR) will be conducting the fourth pulse survey within the next two months to ascertain the level of awareness of Cordillerans on the renewed quest for regional autonomy, citing a 68 percent awareness level of the people once the survey shall have been completed.
Jadedea Aquino, RDC-CAR secretary and assistant regional director of the Cordillera office of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA-CAR), said the region’s policy-making body was able to source out some P1 million to bankroll the said pulse survey to help autonomy advocates to craft whatever needed strategies to sustain the improvement of the on-going information and education campaign on regional autonomy.
She explained the agency had to cut on other expenditures to be able to produce the required funding for the pulse survey so that there will be takers of the activity which is supposedly done every two years to measure the success of the various interventions that were done in support of the region’s renewed quest for autonomy.
“We are elated that when we increased the funds for the conduct of the pulse survey, there were already takers unlike before when the budget was pegged at eight hundred thousand pesos and there were actually no takers even if the project was published through the Philippine electronic governance procurement system,” Aquino stressed.
Based on the baseline survey conducted by the RDC-CAR in 2007 to ascertain the awareness level of Cordillerans on regional autonomy, it turned out that there were only 20 percent of the region’s population who were aware of autonomy with a very high number of undecided individuals who remain unaware of the region’s renewed quest for regional autonomy.
It will be recalled that in 2006, the RDC-CAR embraced autonomy as its overarching agenda to spur the region’s growth and development because the autonomous regional government will have greater control of its resources with lesser restraint from outside forces plus the fact that it has been viewed as the one that will move people out from the shackles of poverty.
The baseline survey was followed by a pulse and tracing survey in 2013 where there was a slight increase in the awareness of Cordillerans on the region’s renewed quest for regional autonomy which was pegged at 27 percent, thus, the revitalized information and education campaign which was anchored on a 4-pronged approach, information education campaign, alliance building, project monitoring and evaluation.
In the 2015 pulse survey, Aquino noted a significant increase in the awareness of Cordillerans on autonomy which increased to 54 percent of the over 5,000 respondents equitable distributed in the different parts of the region.
She expressed optimism that the 2017 pulse survey will generate at least 65 to 68 percent awareness level among Cordillerans on autonomy so that the level of those who are unaware of the cause will be significantly reduced to a level that will be manageable to convince once the autonomy will be enacted into law and brought to the people for ratification in the coming years.
By HENT
