KALAHI-CIDSS
Also known as: Kapit-Bisig Laban sa Kahirapan · KC · KC-NCDDP (National Community-Driven Development Program, its scaled-up successor)
Definition
KALAHI-CIDSS, fully the Kapit-Bisig Laban sa Kahirapan-Comprehensive and Integrated Delivery of Social Services, is the community-driven development (CDD) program of the Department of Social Welfare and Development launched in 2003 with World Bank support. It empowers poor municipalities to identify, prioritize, build and maintain small infrastructure projects, from water systems to day-care centers, through barangay assemblies and competitively awarded block grants.
Identities
| Database | Identifier |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia | Kalahi-CIDSS |
| Wikidata | N/A |
| DBpedia | N/A |
Also Known As
- Kapit-Bisig Laban sa Kahirapan
- KC
- KC-NCDDP (National Community-Driven Development Program, its scaled-up successor)
Examples and Analogies
KALAHI-CIDSS turns development planning into a town-level tournament of proposals: barangays present projects, rank one another’s needs, and winners receive grants, a participatory budgeting process comparable to civic assemblies deciding public works, with the poor communities themselves as both proponents and overseers.
Usage Scenarios
The program finances village-level water supply, footpaths and farm-to-market roads, school buildings and health stations; it was scaled nationally from 2014 and adapted for post-disaster rehabilitation, including recovery work after Typhoon Yolanda, and it channels skills training and employment through community volunteer labor.
Strategies
Program design ties money to participation: facilitators coach communities through diagnosis, proposal and implementation; transparency boards, open assemblies and grievance redress systems police corruption; and empowerment outcomes are tracked alongside infrastructure outputs to keep the CDD logic intact.
Security and Safety Measures
Safeguards include social and environmental screening of subprojects, procurement checks by community monitoring teams, grievance hotlines, and audit trails for grants, measures meant to protect both funds and villagers from elite capture.
Historical Context
Launched in 2003 as an anti-poverty flagship of the Arroyo administration with World Bank financing, the program covered the poorest municipalities in waves, and in 2014 the approach was scaled up as the National Community-Driven Development Program, later extensions carrying the method into disaster response and indigenous-peoples communities.
Challenges and Controversies
Criticism centers on sustainability once facilitators withdraw, uneven local-government counterpart funding, volunteer fatigue among the poor who staff projects without pay, and evaluation debates over whether empowerment gains endure; World Bank reviews nonetheless credit the program with credible poverty-targeting and infrastructure value.
Related Topic
Department of Social Welfare and Development