Philippines ranks 17th among 191 nations in UN’s survey on e-governance

The Philippine Daily Inquirer today came out with an article with this headline. According to the article the DFA at the 7th Global Forum on Reinventing Government at the UN headquarters in Vienna on June 28 cited the partnership between the Philippine government and the private sector to monitor polluters through the Bantay Usok and Bantay Kalikasan programs as a model of how technology was enabling citizens to actively take part in government. I couldn’t believe what I was reading! This is probably only the second time I have ever heard of the Philippines as being a model for anything positive. The first time was when our BOT laws were being copies by other nations as a model for laws governing project finance.

The article goes on to say that this citation was an affirmation of an earlier UN report on Global E-government Readiness where our country was named one of the 25 employing technology or e-government tools to the fullest. The same UN survey also said that the Philippines’ integrated portal www.gov.ph was on par with the best of the world.

My initial reaction was to conclude that either the country’s e-governance was really something to be proud of and that maybe I was just not aware of its extent; or that the other 174 countries just really sucked! But after the initial shock passed, I came to think that maybe there is something to this article. IT may in fact be a useful tool for the Filipino people to take part in governance. We are after all one of the most active “texters” in the world and this texting habit of ours in fact helped rally people to topple the previous administration.

Although the government does deserve some credit for this, I would like to give the most to the Filipino people themselves who have creatively and actively used Information Technology to be heard and take part in governance. In fact not only in governance and not only in texting; the Filipino people were once again heard in the last Miss Universe Pageant where our candidate was awarded Miss Photogenic by garnering the most number of votes cast over the internet. If we won against all the other countries in the pageant by voting online, then this is just a testament to how active we are in using IT to express our views.