Mayor`s Development Center in Mindanao

University of Southeastern Philippines

Governance Department

MDC FACILITY FOR DEVELOPING PROACTIVE, RESPONSIBLE, RESPONSIVE AND INNOVATIVE LOCAL LEADERS IN RELATION TO DISASTER & CRISES MANAGEMENT

The Mayor’s Development Center is a brainchild project of the League of Municipalities of the Philippines created and duly registered with the Securities Exchange Commission.   It is conceived to be the training and development arm for the mayors, cognizant of their pivotal role in bringing about development   and prosperity of their respective towns,   in   effecting social transformation to ensure   improvement   in the quality of lives of their constituencies, ensuring human and ecological security and in innovating as well as in creatively using   the powers   enshrined in the Local Government Code of 1991  to enhance people’s participation in   the various processes in running the affairs of the local governments.

Since its creation, the Mayor’s Development Center (MDC) has been actively engaged in enlisting partnerships both with national and foreign development partners and thus started to develop training /learning modules and facilitated trainings on selected capability areas.   Learning events in the MDC are tailored-fit to mayors and other key LGU leaders and staff as they are made practical, enriching and results oriented where the participants are asked to prepare entry plans in their towns for the adoption or replication of flagship programs.   It is designed to be mainly peer to peer learning engagement where Champion Mayors who have created exemplary local governance practices impart conceptual, experiential and insightful lessons to their co-mayors along side with the expertise and knowledge from experts in the academe or private practitioners.     This rich mix of theoretical, experiential and practical learning events is gradually proving to be a very potent capability enhancement approach because as peers, the bonding, sharing and exchange of knowledge and ideas continue even after the in-house training. Bringing the trainees to learning sites expose and allow them to interact with the end-users of the program/s where their testimonies, stories and real projects attest to the do-ability, soundness and impact of tested LGU strategies/programs/development models.

Owing to the archepelagic distribution of the towns all over the country, the MDC is established on an island basis hence, Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao will each have a Mayor’s Development Center.   Establishing MDC in every island will strategically allow it to serve its clients better in a more cost-effective manner. MDC-Mindanao has been established and viewed not just as a sustainability mechanism for the expansion and replication of the Sustainable Upland Development (SUD) Model but also to be a complementary service provider to regional and national government efforts to ensure human and ecological security:   translating peace efforts, disaster preparedness and crises management at the local level. It is LMP and MDC ‘s responsibility to create the necessary manpower to run on its own the operations of the MDC and help it achieve the goal of a nation-wide replication of sustainable upland development.