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Good practice Imported

Digital Cities 2025 — Decentralising the Philippines' IT-BPM Industry to 25 Provincial Hubs

Philippines · Quezon City · See the Philippines profile · See the Quezon City profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 61% 67/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Since 2020, DICT and IBPAP have built ICT roadmaps for 25 Philippine provincial cities to shift IT-BPM jobs from Metro Manila; countryside employment share rose from ~25% pre-COVID to ~32% of 1.82M industry jobs by 2024, with 19 cities recognised for completed roadmaps.

25 cities
Provincial cities selected for the programme (2020)
19 cities
Cities recognised for completing their roadmap (first Digital Cities Awards)
100,000 ICT jobs
Job creation target (by 2025)
~25 %
Countryside share of IT-BPM employment, pre-pandemic
~32 %
Countryside share of IT-BPM employment, 2024 (2024)
1.82 million
Total IT-BPM industry jobs (2024)
40 %
Projected countryside employment share (by 2028 (projection))

Details

Maturity
Scaling
Promoter
Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) & IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP)
Period
2020–present
Keywords
IT-BPM decentralisation, digital economy, regional development, talent retention

Context

Digital Cities 2025 is a Philippine national industrial-decentralisation programme run by the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) with the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP) and the National ICT Confederation of the Philippines (NICP). Launched in 2020, it selected 25 secondary cities — including Davao, Iloilo, Cagayan de Oro, Clark and Batangas — on graduate output, infrastructure, costs and existing IT-zone presence, and built each a five-year ICT roadmap covering talent development, infrastructure, investor facilitation and marketing, aiming to shift IT-BPM jobs away from congested Metro Manila.

Results

At the first Digital Cities Awards, DICT and IBPAP recognised 19 of the 25 cities for completing their roadmaps; six had not completed theirs within the first cycle. Industry-wide, the countryside's share of IT-BPM employment grew from roughly 25% before the pandemic to about 32% of a total 1.82 million industry jobs by 2024, and IBPAP projects this could reach 40% (over 600,000 countryside jobs) by 2028. No independent evaluation isolates how much of this shift is caused by the programme versus broader remote-work trends, rising Metro Manila costs, or organic investor decisions.

Implementation
Indicative cost
High (€500k–€5M)
Time to results
Long (> 3 years)
Staffing & skills
Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) as lead government agency, IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP) as industry partner, National ICT Confederation of the Philippines (NICP) and local city governments as delivery partners

Conditions for success

  • Criteria-based city selection (graduate output, infrastructure, costs, existing IT-zone presence)
  • Five-year city-specific ICT roadmaps covering talent development, infrastructure, investor facilitation and marketing
  • A formal recognition/awards cycle to track roadmap completion and sustain momentum

Common failure modes

  • Six of the 25 selected cities had not completed their roadmaps within the first cycle, showing the model does not succeed uniformly everywhere
  • Broader national IT-BPM growth trends make it hard to attribute countryside employment gains specifically to the programme

Where it fits

Governance type
national government + industry association partnership
Scale
national (25 provincial cities)
Income level
lower-middle-income

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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