Iloilo City Government through City Population Office (CPO) has implemented the Registry of Barangay Inhabitants and Migrants (RBIM), a database system to assist in setting up local baseline data in compliance with the mandates of the law.
It is designed to generate demographic and selected socioeconomic data that can be used for local development planning.
The system has a standard gathering tool or questionnaires with computer software to ensure the sustainability, accessibility, and integrity of the database.
Its purpose is to serve as a helpful demographic and socioeconomic database at the barangay level that can be utilized to plan Programs, Projects, and Activities (PPAs), and interventions, and to track the internal movements of people from one barangay to another.
Target beneficiaries of this initiative are the development planners – barangay officials, academe, researchers, civil society organizations, business sectors, and city government officials.
CPO Officer-in-Charge Ma. Cecilia Guillergan said there were 12 pilot barangays completed in enumerating and encoding, while the remaining 168 barangays are still ongoing.
“It will be used for the policy formulation – to identify the PPAs that will be used by the investors as a basis for the doability of their businesses. It can be also utilized as a critical intervention to different demographic and population issues and will be used for the cost estimates of the city’s projects as part of development planning; with the data around, plans are easier,” she added.
The census works to identify people and collect demographic information such as nationality, education, ethnicity, religion, economic activities, health information, socio-civic data, and migration data.
CPO taught and trained 237 Barangay Service Point Officers (BSPOs) to enumerate the 180 barangays who are tasked with performing a “survey” to obtain statistics on the population of incoming and outgoing migrants.
“Once encoded, automatically it will appear in the system here in CPO, so, we will monitor and track all encoded households in the barangays. Every week we do an update and we see to it that they will achieve the target progression of the barangays,” Guillergan said.
When the survey accomplishes 100%, CPO will process the data for eventual utilization by beneficiaries.
There will be semi-annual updates to generate real-time data.
Guillergan said they are looking at the first half of next year to complete the rest of the barangays. (Alexandra Jover/Iloilo City PIO)
