MESSAGE:
An Overview of Project Concept
RESURRECCION Z. BORRA
Commissioner
March 22, 2007, Sofitel Philippine Plaza
Greetings:
To our distinguished guests, honorable gentlemen and ladies, we welcome you in gracing this occasion for the launching of the First Election Handbooks for our COMELEC Officials and for our Board of Election Inspectors (BEIs) for the May 14, 2007 elections.
The International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) along with USAID started the tone of our collaborative effort on this very significant project. The Election Handbook for COMELEC Officials were printed with their support/funding. With Strategic Planning partly funded by IFES/USAID, our Operation MERIT has defined our Vision, Mission and Value Statements for 2006 to 2010. Our COMELEC National Pool of Trainers in four batches and 2 batches on Election Monitoring successfully completed their trainings with regional and field assignments, were also funded by IFES/USAID. Our deepest gratefulness and appreciation to our fund sponsors for the cause of clean, honest, orderly, peaceful and credible elections on May 14, 2007.
We do extend our deepest gratitude and appreciation to the collaboration of The Asia Foundation (TAF) and the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) for their generous support in granting us the printing of the Election Handbook for our BEIs, a first in COMELEC history designed to aid all the election deputies in administering the electoral exercises for the forthcoming elections to be distributed even to the remotest far flung areas in the country along school based approach.
Furthermore, with the skillful help of our more experienced consultants and key experts in the field and central office in cooperation with the U. P. National College of Public Administration and Governance (NCPAG), Center for Leadership, Citizenship, and Democracy (CLCD), we completed the training of our COMELEC central office personnel to pursue our ICE-T (Integrated, Comprehensive and Experiential for Transparency) in election administration.
This is part of an overall reform program ongoing within COMELEC that aims to instill Integrity, Credibility, Efficacy for Truth (ICE-T) values in the workplace using an Integrative, Communicative and Educative Teamwork (ICET) approach among the workforce. This initiative is a takeoff from a strategic planning workshop done in January, 2006 which culminated in the creation of the operation Modernization and Electoral Reform for Integrity and Transparency (MERIT) that aims to transform and re-engineer the COMELEC.
In line with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), this is one of COMELEC’s commitments even in modest way of contributing to the restoration of confidence in our democratic process strengthening good governance through global developmental partnership.
May we challenge you all to join with COMELEC and along with PPCRV, our accredited citizens arm in this crusade to rally with our perennial deputies in the field (the BEIs) who are the unsung heroes and heroine to use these handbooks as guide to maintain integrity, sobriety and order and to contribute to the achievement of our mandated electoral goals.
May God bless us!
Thank you very much to all of you.
