PopCom told to have separate budget for reproductive health

The reproductive health program, to be effective, should have a separate budget from the total cost of other programs, the Commission on Audit told the Population Commission recently.

The COA, in its 2005 Audit Report, said the Philippine Population Management Program was not fully enforced because of difficulty in collating information or resources for population and reproductive health components.

These reproductive health components were often incorporated with the total cost of some health development programs of national and local government units, the COA said.

The program implementation assessment, as reported by the International Conference on Population and Development, also stated that such kind of situation would make it difficult to determine which amount goes to what program.

COA said it was also difficult to pinpoint how much assistance came from foreign donors for the reproductive health programs. There have been foreign donors who used to send money, through the "direct payment scheme", to payees and thus not going through government's accounting.

These donors made payments directly to suppliers, resource persons, facilitators or airlines for supplies and materials, honoraria, and plane tickets, all of which do not pass government accounting as well.

COA added that foreign donors sometimes have agreements with local governments on program output and budget, resulting in the problem of how to get the total resources or how much were the funds applied for the program.

Local governments further provide financial support to the program mostly by absorbing staff salaries, maintenance costs and other operating expenses. The lack of documentation, however, made it difficult to determine the total amount of financial aid for the program, COA said.

With these findings, COA recommended that PopCom should seek assistance from concerned government agencies on ways to segregate the accounts for population and reproductive health fund from the total cost of some health programs.

This will facilitate the preparation of the Population Investment Plan, which the PopCom Secretariat had formulated and the PopCom Board had approved, to determine the budget requirements for every population program, said COA.

The investment plan would then define every project or program and its corresponding level of expenses needed for enforcement. Sectors could then collaborate with each other on their respective investments and fill the gaps of attention to a particular program, said COA. - Ferliza C. Contratista/RAE