Sunday, February 28, 2010

Entrepreneurship Teachers in Manila Graduate Basic Skills Training


Inner City Development Cooperative (ICDC), our partner in Manila, Philippines, has been busy preparing for the full rollout of the Barefoot MBA entrepreneurship curriculum set in motion in August 2009 in Bacolod, Philippines. They just completed their first internal training of trainers, which consisted of training 16 ICDC staff from each of their four Manila branches to become certified Barefoot MBA teachers.

This is a significant milestone for GIVE’s work in SE Asia. For several years, we’ve searched for an appropriate business skills training model that would assist us in fulfilling a core area of our mission: providing the tools for assisting microentrepreneurs in becoming more successful business owners.

To this end, GIVE is utilizing the Barefoot MBA, an open-source business training module developed by Scott Raymond and Katherine Boas. It’s been 6 months since GIVE organized a training of trainers workshop with Scott, Catherine and our partners from the Philippines and Cambodia.

Despite setbacks endured by ICDC in the aftermath of the tragic typhoon that resulted in severe flooding in Manila in September and October last year, which significantly impacted the communities in which we work, we are happy that our plans are now back on track and moving forward for 2010.

The completion of the ICDC training of trainers was accompanied by a graduation ceremony attended by Steven Van Yoder, founder and director of GIVE. It was rewarding to see the results of so many months of hard work, and the determination of our partners and their communities to carry on after such devastating challenges. But GIVE and our friends at ICDC are ready to put our programs into action!