Group to train OSY, ALS students become employable

• Features
• Education

by Oliver Samson - December 14, 2014 BUSINESSMIRROR

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THE volunteer group that helped over 100 families of earthquake survivors in Bohol rebuild their homes will train 1,150 out-of-school youth (OSY) and students in the province starting early 2015.

The group is planning to give a training on employability to the young people from communities devastated by the 7.2-magnitude earthquake that intensely shook the island in October last year, said Nestor Pestelos, Bohol Local Development Foundation (BLDF) president.

“We will pilot two projects,” he said. “One, the Youth Skills Project on refrigeration in partnership with a local air-conditioning shop. The other, the Bikes for Rent Project in the municipality of Baclayon.”

The trainings are part of the initial venture of the foundation’s “Informal Employment and Sustainable Livelihood Project (IESLP)” for communities devastated by the earthquake, seeking to provide OSY and Alternative Learning System (ALS) students with “employable skills,” Pestelos said.

A maximum of 100 OSY and ALS students can be trained every month, starting February on refrigeration, tour guiding, bicycle maintenance and repair, managing souvenir shops, and selling of bicycle spare parts, he said. “This is new in Bohol,” Pestelos said. “Baclayon will be a place where out-of-school youth and ALS students can learn and establish their own bicycles-for-rent project and later, a repair shop.”

BLDF sees informal employment and sustainable livelihood are required among communities severely damaged by the earthquake, as well as those outside the calamity zone to help “address current development problems” in the area, he said. Based on the experiences of small-island economies, IESLP generates effects that provide “community groups and individual households” with systematic support to “food production” and other undertakings, like environment conservation and protection, Pestelos said.

The project has a capacity to “increase family income and build both economic and social capital” to address poverty and social problems accompanying it, like theft, drug addiction and other crimes, he said.

More skills training will follow refrigeration and bicycle repair and maintenance workshops. Future projects of the volunteer group in communities hit by earthquake in Bohol under IESLP include small-scale food production for home consumption, family-based production and marketing of rice, corn, fish, poultry swine and handicrafts, Pestelos said.

The central focus of the project is stepping up informal economic activities at community and home levels to the effect of increasing household income, he said. This way, they help address their own problems around prior and after the earthquake, Pestelos noted.

After “employable skills” and livelihood trainings, the OSY and their ALS student counterparts will be deployed in different sustainable livelihood projects.

Proposed projects under BLDF’s informal employment and sustainable livelihood program include organic-rice growing, eco-tourism, banana production and processing, organic-hog raising, handicraft-making, tour guiding, refrigeration and peanut farming, Pestelos said.

Through the assistance of government and private sector, BLDF will brace its project with “relevant policy measures, financial inputs, improvement of processes, sound linkage to markets, and better institutional arrangements” to ensure if that works.

This will intensify production and broaden the market, improving profitability easing poverty and conserving and environment in effect, Pestelos said. The foundation is seeking to provide a total of 1,150 OSY and ALS students from the communities in Bohol before the end of 2015 with employable skills and livelihood trainings, he said. “We can increase the number depending on the projects that can be provided with support through our fund campaign,” Pestelos said.

Back Again to Blogging

Here we are again, five months after my last blog as DevWorker. Urgent matters kept us away. The magnitude 7.2 earthquake 15 October last year has kept us busy with a lot of things: distributing relief goods sent by friends; organizing a fund drive to help those made homeless by the quake; monitoring the house build in target barangays of two municipalities, Calape and Antequera; attending meetings organized by the government and international donors; promoting the planting of dwarf coconut trees among the quake victims as short-term source of cash and long-term strategy for livelihood; serving as tour guide to supporters of Bohol Quake Assistance Fund Drive, an initiative of BLDF in partnership with Miriam College and Peacock Garden, a world-class resort here in Baclayon, Bohol.

Prior to the quake, we had been going through a rather grim assessment of what our development efforts of the past 40 years amounted to. It's more than half of a lifetime of work with development agencies and NGOs and we are faced with the reality that we are meeting the same set of problems in our work, most notable of which is the lack of sustained interest on the part of individuals and organizations we work with at local levels. I realized we spent more time in donor-assisted capacity-building activities than in  providing real "hardware" support to community initiatives.

There seemed to be no end to consultations, orientation, seminars and workshops paid for by external donors than with activities designed to find out more about existing local initiatives and seeking ways and means to enhance them. The result is that we become more of a burden to local governments and communities by robbing them of precious time to look at their concrete situation and helping them improve what they are really doing. Most of the so-called capacity-building activities are based on modules field-tested some place without bearing to local conditions. Hence, the locals are not better off with new practical knowledge to improve what they do. They are instead loaded with new acronyms which are difficult for them to remember and are not useful in helping improve the planning and implementation of projects.

The participatory development concepts and processes that we have subscribed to in decades of work with local governments and communities are generally not subscribed to in the planning, implementation and monitoring of projects. Everything seems to depend on what the higher level of authority says. No striving at all for project officers to understand the local situation and how projects can be made more relevant to it. Worst, if you are an NGO implementing a project, you become an extension of government in building an authority-centered approach as opposed to the participatory approach.

Again, I might be wrong in this perception, but it tortured me for quite some time. Then the earthquake happened. Somehow this natural disaster shook us from the comfort of just looking back and comparing whtat happened in the past to what we saw as trends in present-day development work. We stopped blogging for fear we might infect readers with our negative thoughts and the depression which seemed to have set in.

The extent of the devastation and the need to act provided us a basis for trying out the relevance of the old participatory approach to the current situation. Indeed back to action.

Indeed back to blogging, too.