President Benigno S. Aquino III confers the 2012 Most Business-Friendly Local Government Unit Award - Highly Urbanized City Category to Valenzuela City during the culmination of the 38^th Philippine Business Conference and Expo today, October 11, at the Manila Hotel.

Valenzuela City received the award from the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI) for its outstanding efforts in instituting good governance reforms to promote trade and investment not only for the benefit of the business community, but of the wide constituency, ensuring transparency and accountability.

The search has been running for 10 years now as an initiative to recognize and promote model LGUs that have demonstrated improved business competitiveness and efficiency, and reforms undertaken in streamlining business permits and licensing system.  Valenzuela City excelled in this year’s six key yardstick areas, namely; trade, investments and tourism promotions; public-private sector partnership; micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) development; quality management system, innovations, and human resources development; quality customer service; and inter-local government relations.

City Mayor WIN Gatchalian shares the award with the city government employees, the local business sector and all the constituents who also worked hard to help him achieve his goals for the city.  “Without their support and full cooperation, no implemented program would have been successful,” he said.

Valenzuela City’s business and investment platforms have garnered awards and citations from numerous credible organizations, such as, the DILG, World Bank and International Finance Corporation; making the city one of the favorite destinations for study tour of local government units from different parts of the country and is a choice venue for the implementation of the USAID Investment Benchmarking project, which fellow-finalist in the search, Cagayan De Oro is one of the three beneficiary cities.

Valenzuela City has been implementing a culture-building principle at the city hall through a program dubbed 3S(Simple, Speed, Service Excellence), the city’s anti-graft and corruption platform to guarantee transparency and good governance.  Through this, the processes for application of business permits were reduced from the 10 tedious steps to 3 simple and easy steps, allowing a business owner to get license in 20 minutes or less.  Post-audit system of the requirements was also developed for the businesses to be up and running in no time.    

PCCI Chairman Atty. Miguel B. Varela said that this year’s entrants revealed that LGUs have taken upon themselves to improve the business environment in their localities to attract more investments and to promote trade.  “Valenzuela City is a testament that PCCI is making inroads in our advocacy for LGUs to institute good governance reforms so that businesses and their communities will grow and prosper,” he concluded.