Furthermore, social impact studies conducted by the European and American donors were not that encouraging. This led to a decline in donor resources for development NGOs, whose numbers likewise fell.

The nineties, however, introduced to the rest of Asia such models as the Grameen Bank and the many self-help schemes for organized communities. Major Philippine NGOs ventured into microfinancing by adopting Asian paradigms and adapting them to Philippine conditions. To be sure, there were already many local interventions in microfinancing pushed by lending investors in public markets, mutual savings and loans associations and the usual five-six financing schemes. Corporate social foundations and faith-based philanthropic organizations led the way. Today, microfinancing has proliferated nation-wide. A few large MFIs maintain that their main purpose is to help the poor uplift their lives. However, rural banks and commercial banks have entered the fray with purely business objectives, even as traditional money lenders have found new legitimacy for their high-interest lending practices. They have discovered that “producing and marketing for and lending to the bottom of the pyramid” is a very attractive business proposition.

Microfinancing has indeed enabled socially oriented organizations to become financially sustainable to the point that they are able to fund health , education and organizing activities. Several faith-based MFIs have parallel NGO foundations to ensure that the social mission is kept high on the agenda. Some MFIs have decided to set aside a certain amount of “social dividends” yearly to ensure that the social mission is kept alive. Others have expanded their operations to include health insurance, scholarship and values formation programs.

Two years ago, a group of five large Philippine MFIs gathered to assess their directions. In the course of the discussions, there was a realization that while the vision and mission statements of the five MFIs were biased towards social development, most, if not all of their periodic performance indicators, were focused on financial viability and sustainability. In fairness, there were sporadic attempts at conducting social impact analysis but these were few and far between. On the whole, the MFIs were performing very well financially but the question remained as to whether they were making a big difference in the mission of poverty alleviation and the upliftment of the quality of lives of the poor.


DEMOCRATIZING ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Early in 2006, new leadership brought changes to the philosophy and major strategies of ABS-CBN Bayan Foundation. Bayan is one of the five pillars of the ABS-CBN Foundation, Inc. The other four are dedicated to media-based children’s education, the fight against child abuse, ecological conservation and the relief and rehabilitation of disaster-stricken areas.

Bayan is committed to improve the lives of low income Filipino families by providing them opportunities to gain financial freedom, live decent lives and enjoy better education, health and housing. Bayan is, likewise, deeply committed to foster good citizenship, deepen people’s love of God and country and embrace the universal ideals of equity, truth, harmony, integrity and compassion, or ETHIC.

For Bayan, microfinancing merely serves as its strategic means, and not its end. Bayan’s intention is to be a bona fide social entrepreneur. The challenge for Bayan, as for other MFIs, is how to become more and more social and more and more entrepreneurial. However, the performance measures of Bayan did not incorporate the important social dimensions and monitor the progress of the beneficiaries we were committed to serve. Right there and then, Bayan decided to drop most of the standard financial measures recommended by the National MFI Council. Some measures could not even be understood by Bayan managers. Deliberately and consciously, Bayan decided to pursue development depth and not breadth, quality outcomes and not quantity of beneficiaries, relevance to the social mission, and not blind adherence to financial standards. We, in Bayan, decided to position ourselves as a model social entrepreneur in every sense of the word.

How does Bayan become more social and how does it become more entrepreneurial? Focusing on the entrepreneurial poor, we exhorted our loan officers to be more conscious of the fact that their job is not simply to lend money, but to nurture and grow the llivelihood of our clients, hopefully to a point of transforming them into viable microenterprises that can sustain the family and provide jobs to jobless neighbors. For a start, each of our loan officers is mandated to choose and chart the progress of 20% or 30 of their 150 clients. We devised a monitoring system that would track the sales, asset growth and net worth of our clients. For this we need to train all our loan officers in basic enterprise management. Our loan officers must also track the education, health, and decent living indices of their 30 clients. From this initial thirty clients, our loan officers must progressively  cover the rest of their 150 clients.

To raise the entrepreneurial competency of our clientele, Bayan is launching a grassroots entrepreneurship and management program, Entrep Eskwela, in collaboration with our media principal and partner MFIs, notably the Center for Community Transformation.   We have mobilized experts in training small and medium scale entrepreneurs to create new and exciting modules for micro entrepreneurs. The formula is to use Pilipino (and other dialects) as the language of instruction, make the materials highly audio-visual, and entertaining, and increase the interactivity level of the learning experience. Our training modules are designed to appeal more to the wholistic, visual and emotional right brain rather than the cold calculating logic of the left brain. Admittedly, there will be ample left brain exercises such as preparing personal and family budgets, but this would come after much motivational priming.

Beyond entrepreneurship, we are identifying the male spouses and older children (of our largely women borrowers) who are looking for jobs. We are tying up with local governments and their schools to improve workers’ skills and install job placement programs. We are also fielding mobile training vans or roving schools that would impart skills in the culinary arts, hairstyling, welding, dressmaking and other livelihood courses in 2007 and beyond. If both mothers and fathers of poor families are able to earn more money through self-employment or jobs, then the welfare of the children would be taken cared of better. They would have better health, better education and better housing. They will grow up in families that work and care for each other, living the values of model citizens.

Bayan has started to deploy its people to design, develop and deliver Technical and Livelihood Courses for our communities and the client systems of our partners. This is our Sanayang pang Hanap-buhay and Kabuhayan program. To push the social agenda even further, we are determined to use the power of our media principal. We have excellent television-based children’s courses on science, math and values formation. We intend to cascade these courses to our branches in cooperation with local schools or governments. We will avail more frequently of media facilities and programs to push our own development agenda. For example, the Corporate Social Responsibility arms of large businesses are availing of Bayan services for community leadership, livelihood and enterprise management training. If these CSR arms want the training done in non-Bayan communities, we have opted to utilize the wider reach of our partner MFIs to provide these communities their much needed microfinancing assistance. Bayan’s lack of reach will be adequately addressed by our partners’ larger branch networks. Bayan is more than willing and happy to share our expertise and programs with our partners. Collaboration rather than competition will be our operational battlecry.

Aspiring to become a more socially relevant organization is one thing, trying to become a truly entrepreneurial organization poses the bigger challenge. In here, we have decided to adopt the stricter definition of entrepreneurship which is to increase levels of industry and business productivity, to enhance and expand the value of goods and services, and to change the enterprise delivery paradigm for the greater benefit of both the producers and the consumers.

Entrepreneuring is not simply about setting up a business, buying and selling goods and making money in the process. It is about raising PRODUCTIVITY levels through innovation and technology. It is about PROFESSIONALIZING the enterprise by adopting better management processes, superior systems and efficient practices. It is about raising PROFITABILITY by creating new markets, delighting customers, optimizing the use of resources and improving management effectiveness. It is about changing PARADIGMS to gain competitive advantage and launch breakthrough strategies for doing business. It is about elevating the status of PEOPLE in the organization and bringing out the best in them.


DEMOCRATIZING EDUCATION

The developmental sectors of society, especially those involved in the socio-economic upliftment of the less privileged, have limited access to good quality entrepreneurship and management education programs.  Most college and graduate degree courses are not designed nor delivered to address the education requirements of developmental organizations and small or micro entrepreneurs.  They cater mostly to large and medium scale businesses, their primary target markets.   Moreover, their tuition fees are prohibitively expensive for most.  Even short courses or seminars are priced beyond the reach of development organizations and small entrepreneurs.  In addition, most of the high quality educational offerings have very limited reach because they are held mainly in Metro Manila or, infrequently, in the major cities of the country. There is, therefore, a very pressing need to mainstream entrepreneurship and management education, especially in three critical sectors that have the highest potential for attaining tremendous socio-economic impact.  These are:

1. Social development and microfinance institutions,  social enterprises, cooperatives and countryside banks
2. Micro and small scale enterprises
3. Schools and institutes that provide  both  formal and non-formal education