Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III is urging local government units (LGUs) to take advantage of two funding programs administered by the Department of Finance (DOF) to build climate-resilient communities and implement development projects in their respective cities and municipalities through grants and low-cost loans.

Dominguez said these programs are funded through the (1) People’s Survival Fund (PSF), which was set up to implement climate change-adaptation projects in vulnerable communities; and (2) Municipal Development Fund (MDF) administered by the DOF’s Municipal Development Fund Office (MDFO), which provides affordable loans to LGUs to let them improve the delivery of basic services through the construction of water systems, roads and other infrastructure projects.

In his recent visit to the town of Guiuan in Eastern Samar, Dominguez gave local executives of the province an overview of these two fund sources and told them that he would send personnel from the MDFO and the Bureau of the Treasury (BTr), which alternately chairs the PSF Board with the DOF, to provide them detailed presentations of these programs and accept applications from interested LGUs.

“The first one is a grant fund that we provide grants for climate change adaptation, so these are protection of your shores, in case there are higher tides due to the adverse effects of climate change, maybe solar electricity that we can help fund, water projects and projects sort of like building shelters for emergencies,” Dominguez told Eastern Samar mayors present during his visit to the coastal municipality of Guiuan.

Guiuan was the first point of impact of super typhoon Yolanda, which devastated large parts of Eastern Visayas in 2013.

Dominguez, along with US Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim and Eastern Samar Rep. Ben Evardone, were in Guiuan on a site visit to the Secondary National Roads Development Project (SNRDP) that was funded through grant by the United States through the Millennium Challenge Corp. (MCC).

During his meeting with Eastern Samar’s mayors and councilors, Dominguez also said they can tap the MDFO fund for their development projects.

“We also have the MDFO which provides long-term and low-cost loans for municipalities to build public markets, build water systems, build roads as well as also municipal halls,” Dominguez said. “We are very open to that and it’s our office that manages these funds.”

The MDFO administers the Municipal Development Fund (MDF), a special revolving fund that was established for relending to local government units (LGUs) to enable them to tap funds from local and international sources for the implementation of their respective development projects.

Meanwhile, with a programmed annual fund of at least P1 billion in the National Treasury, the PSF is intended to fund climate change adaptation projects of LGUs and accredited community organizations. The PSF Board, chaired by Dominguez, manages and administers the PSF.

This fund is on top of the annual appropriations allocated to LGUs for climate-change related programs and projects.

Among the activities eligible for funding by the PSF are projects on water resources management, land management, agriculture and fisheries, and health, and other activities that serve as guarantee for the risk insurance needs for farmers, agricultural workers and other stakeholders.

Dominguez and Ambassador Kim, accompanied by Evardone, flew to Guiuan last March 12 to conduct a site visit on the SNRDP.

Funded by the MCC, a US foreign aid agency, the SNRDP spans 222.23 kilometers of roads and 61 bridges that have all been completed as of September 2016.

The SNRDP, which was part of the MCC’s first Compact agreement with the Philippines completed in 2016, involved the construction and rehabilitation of roads and bridges starting from Barangay Buray in Paranas, Samar, which connects Northern Samar to Eastern Samar, and ends in the town of Guiuan.

This project is among the development interventions that contributed to the rise of newly constructed commercial establishments such as hotels, fastfood stores, supermarkets, shopping centers and gasoline stations in Borongan City, Eastern Samar’s capital, according to a report by the DOF’s International Finance Group (IFG).

With the construction and improvement of roads and bridges under the SNRDP, travel time from Borongan City to Tacloban City in Leyte, the nearest highly urbanized city to the province, has been reduced from four to two-and-a-half hours, according to Evardone.

This has led to an influx of local tourists in Samar and Eastern Samar, with the Samar Island Natural Park reporting a 100 percent increase in the number of visitors last year.

Last March 7, Dominguez led the signing ceremony in Manila of the financing agreements between the PSF Board and four LGUs selected as the initial beneficiaries of the PSF.

These initial LGU-beneficiaries are the local governments of: 1) Lanuza, Surigao del Sur, 2) Del Carmen, Surigao del Norte, 3) San Francisco, Camotes Island in Cebu and 4) Gerona, Tarlac.

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