The Open Government Partnership is a multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from national and subnational governments to promote open government, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. As one of the new cohort of participants to the OGP Local Program, the Province of South Cotabato developed its South Cotabato Open Government Partnership (SC-OGP) Action Plan 2018 – 2020. The SC-OGP Action Plan 2018 – 2020 is the product of series of workshops and consultations with key stakeholders coming from the civil society and the local government. On September 29, 2018, South Cotabato submitted its first action plan to the OGP Secretariat.
The development of the Province of South Cotabato is guided by the shared aspirations of its people for a safe and livable settlement that supports, nurtures, and promotes the sustainable and competitive growth of its city and municipalities. With this developmental direction, the province aims to achieve equitable and rational distribution of population, resources, income and opportunities across its eleven component local government units – small and medium-sized city and towns are supplemented with primary strategies for achieving poverty reduction and social justice. Significantly positioned at the core of the province’s developmental framework is good governance. South Cotabato is committed to promote participatory, transparent, and accountable governance as its primordial purpose towards the realization of its collective dream. This is where the development of the SC-OGP Action Plan is based upon.
tThe people of South Cotabato constantly endeavor to weave together their dreams in order to create a beautiful masterpiece of a home – one they can truly call ‘the Land of the Dreamweavers’. This can only be made possible by putting good governance at the core of South Cotabato’s development framework. Hence, in support of the shared vision of a caring, resilient, functionally-integrated, and equitably growing province that is highly responsive to the socio-economic needs and environmental concerns of every self-reliant South Cotabateño, the provincial government is committed in improving its efforts to promote participatory, transparent and accountable governance through open government.