Group to train OSY, ALS students become employable
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.
