WBA enhances its draft Operations Manual

 

'Recall Circle' on day 2 of the workshop with participants recalling and

 sharing what each of them remembers from yesterday's session.

Isabela City, Basilan (November 16, 2021) – Local planning, agriculture, and finance personnel from the Western Basilan Alliance (WBA) convenes today for a week-long workshop to enhance their draft operations manual. The workshop will run for up to Friday, November 19, at the Kasinnahan Hotel and Resort, this city.

In his opening statement, Mr. Zia Ulhaq Basa, the WBA Alliance Management Office (AMO) manager welcomes the participants to this activity and hopes that they will exert their best efforts to share their ideas and experiences in enhancing the first draft which they started developing in May 2021.

Mayor Hanie A Bud of Maluso, the interim chair of the WBA, claims that this alliance is arguably the most functional in the BARMM region. He reminds everyone that the current coastal resources management (CRM) is just one of the many development focuses of the alliance. He enlightens the participants about the other development focus, such as good governance, peace and security, critical social services, and eco- and culture-based tourism.

The training team comes from the Ateneo Center for Leadership and Governance (ACLG) of the Ateneo de Zamboanga University (AdZU) and composed of team leader May Bulanon, lead trainer Ari Ismael and documenter-writer Cha Ibanez. Aside from facilitating this week's workshop, the training team will also come up with version 2 of the operations manual, incorporating salient points of the WBA Memorandum of Agreement (MoA), critical ingredients in the alliance-building manual, organizational development theory, and from the unique Basilan context.

The ACLG team engages the participants through a generative lecture-workshop methodology. Each session starts with a short overview of critical ingredients in the alliance-building manual. Small group workshop follows building on the participants' experiences and aspirations. Thereafter, every group presents their output and listens to comments from other groups, and is given another round to refine their output.

Western Basilan Alliance is the first inter-LGU cooperation in the province and is being capacitated by the Spanish aid agency AECID-funded MILAB 2 Project, implemented by the Institute for Autonomy and Governance (IAG) in partnership with the provincial and selected municipal governments.