Manila's Business One-Stop Shop
The mayor signed Executive Order 8 in July 2019, pulling the Bureau of Permits, the treasury, zoning, engineering and the health department into a single Business One-Stop Shop. The city says applicants went from eleven steps and eight days or more to three — file, pay, claim — in one day. The Anti-Red Tape Authority later counted Manila among just 13 local governments nationwide running a fully electronic one-stop shop. The online channel, though, is the GO Manila app, and the city still staffs help desks in six shopping malls and at City Hall for applicants who cannot use it.
📊 Impact
Manila says the one-stop shop cut business-permit processing from eleven steps and eight days or more to three steps in a single day, on the city's own 2019 figures. Businesses in the city paid 4.95 billion pesos in permit fees in 2024, though no source ties that total to the reform.
🎓 Lesson
Certification is not adoption: Manila met the national electronic-permitting standard, then had to staff help desks in six shopping malls to walk applicants through the app.
Sources
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Manila's Business One-Stop Shop” — Manila, Philippines. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/manila-business-one-stop-shop/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
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