19 months too late

The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) should rethink its Jurassic public information strategies because we now live in the “as it happens” world.

Thus, when President Aquino said in his last State of the Nation Address that some 40,000 overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) went home to the Philippines for good because they found jobs here, media asked the POEA for supporting data.

Among the questions thrown POEA’s way were: 1) Which local industries lured back the OFWs from their presumably high-paying jobs abroad? and 2) What’s the average daily deployment figures for OFWs that may show it’s either going down or going up?

The POEA cannot refer those asking the said questions to its annual compendium of OFW statistics which is released usually in the middle of the following year. That kind of stuff is only good for those writing thesis papers.

Since everything is computerized these days, there’s absolutely no excuse for the POEA not to immediately come up with the sought-after figures like during the SONA. If the question is asked in the morning, the POEA should have the answer by afternoon or at the latest the next day.

After all, media, whether social or mainstream, cannot wait for the POEA’s annual compendium of OFW data to answer questions that need answering RIGHT NOW, and not 19 months later.

Not only did the POEA keep quiet on the request for data following the SONA, it is also keeping mum on the claim of a labor group that from about 2,000 departures a day a few years back the average daily departures of OFWs have reached about 6,000.

What? Does the POEA need an app to track its own data on a daily basis or at least a weekly basis so that it would not appear to be unresponsive to request for data? There are too many program developers in the Philippines who could rescue the POEA’s data management and dissemination system from the Dark Ages. –End-        

Image by: cnbc radio