Barangay Caloocan to Pilot the RBMI
The City Government of Koronadal intends to establish the Registry of Barangay Inhabitants and Migrants (RBIM) through its City Population Office, with Barangay Caloocan serving as the pilot barangay.
Commission on Population and Development (PopCom) launched the RBIM, formerly known as the Local Migration Information System, in 2017 with the goal of tracking internal movements of people from one barangay/municipality to another.
The City Population Office, with the help of PopCom Regional Office XII, is working to create the RBIM, which will serve as a helpful demographic and socioeconomic database at the community level that can be utilized to plan programs, projects, and interventions. The census is used to identify people and collect demographic information such as nationality, religion, ethnicity, education, economic activities, health data, socio-civic data, and migration data. The program could provide small and large-scale databases for communities, biometrics, ID-system readiness and data management and analysis.
Meanwhile, as the project’s pilot barangay, PopCom XII taught the 26 enumerators of Barangay Caloocan who will be entrusted with performing a “survey” to acquire statistics on the population of incoming and outgoing migrants in the said barangay. The PopComXII will also give coaching and mentorship.
According to Janet Demonteverde, City Population Officer, the initiative will be implemented throughout the city and will contribute significantly to the “Gender and Development” program as well as serve as the framework for local government actions throughout the crisis. It’s also done with best-practice interventions and decision-making based on real-time data.
Carlito M. Tulog, Project Evaluation Officer of PopCom XII, believes that RBMI has numerous long-term benefits. “In particular, in times of disaster, having data on every household allows the LGU to easily conduct relief operations. Also, this will help barangay officials determine whether the people who come to live in the barangay are harmless”, he said. Tulog explained that family planning is a part of its coverage, and that data on which family planning methods are used by mothers is being collected.
During the two-day training, the trainers provided participants with an overview of the situation in Koronadal and Barangay Caloocan. The participants were given lectures on the RBMI as a response to internal migration, as well as basic concepts and data collection tools. There is also a data collection practice, which includes field protocols for field interviewer, supervisor, and encoder.
A component of the training is “Action Planning,” which identifies the barangay’s activities. They will determine how many people are moving in and out of each family this year based on the survey results. There will be quarterly or semi-annual updates as well. The survey’s execution will be determined by the manpower capacity of the enumerators and the number of households.