GOVERNMENT officials and other stakeholders have committed to achieve the goals of the Joint Program on Reaping the Demographic Dividend and Managing the Socio-Economic Impact of Covid-19 by Applying an Integrated National Financing Framework in the Philippines (JP INFF), which was launched on Friday.

The JP INFF aims to adopt three strategies to accomplish the joint program’s objectives, including the strengthening and integration of current INFF building blocks into the national government’s planning, budgeting and monitoring infrastructure, to ensure adequate funding and better delivery.

Finance and coordination of multisector priority Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) programs that lower future SDG expenditure requirements is also one of the JP INFF objectives. Finally, alternative finance sources for the SDGs must also be identified under the program.

During the launch, Gustavo Gonzales, the United Nations resident coordinator in the Philippines, emphasized the importance of mobilizing a large amount of funding to put policies in place that will assist the JP INFF achieve its goals.

“This project is like creating a big picture,” he explained, “where we will try to match the different sources of funding to make sure that we are supporting policies that are helping the recovery and to put us on the SDG agenda.”

The JP INFF, according to Socioeconomic Planning

Secretary Karl Kendrick Chua, “is a very important way to prioritize to determine who is in the best position to support our needs, who can do it better and faster, and how we should target the support so that the people actually feel it.”

He went on to say that the Philippine government, for its part, is focusing on three key pillars in order to recover and bring the country back on track to meet its SDGs.

These pillars involve vaccination, risk management and the speed with which the country’s recovery plan is implemented.

“So, that is where we are. I am still hopeful that after a few years of delay, we will be able to get back on track because of the strong social and economic foundations and our commitment to the SDGs,” Chua added.

Meanwhile, Finance Undersecretary Gil Beltran said the government is working for the passage of the remaining bills under its Comprehensive Tax Reform Program in order to expedite the country’s recovery from Covid-19 and put the economy back on pace to achieve the SDGs.

“There are still two phases of the comprehensive tax reform program that are now in the Senate and we expect that these measures will be approved this year to allow us to obtain the 3 percent of gross domestic product, additional revenues that are expected from the program,” he emphasized

Among these are improvements to the country’s property assessment system as well as taxes on passive income and financial intermediaries.

MAYVELIN U. CARABALLO