Wanted: More Pinoy Entrepreneurs

Thirty years ago – maybe more – we have been said to be on the verge of some industrial take off or other. We were up there in the Asian economic totem pole third only to Japan and Singapore.

The take off never happened. Did we run out of gas, suffered a flat tire, got derailed by infighting?

The signposts are alarming. Many of our women still dream of going abroad to be mail-order brides, to be singers and entertainers, or to take domestic and “care-giving” jobs most of the locals — Americans, Europeans, etc. — wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.

Our men possibly fare better, but not too much better. Many train to become engineers, technicians and skilled artisans; but once they get some minimum experience locally, they take off for some job abroad, draining our country of the skilled human resources it needs so badly for its own oft-postponed “take-off.”

The social costs of Pinoys leaving home in pursuit of the American dollar are unquantifiable. We see them all around us — broken homes, split marriages, unsupervised children dropping out of school and turning to drugs and other vices or entering into relationships for which they are not ready.

Many concerned Filipinos have wearied of trying to study what’s wrong with the country or the national psyche.

They just want action — an action plan that is doable or, to use the technocrat’s term, SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timebound).

There may be very few action plans smarter than a national entrepreneurship campaign – a campaign for independent, job-creating, income-producing entrepreneurship — where all sectors can close rank for.

In communities where entrepreneurs abound, the population stay rather than migrate, roads and infrastructures are built, social and educational services are improved, commerce booms, and the quality of life rises. Enterprise begets more enterprise, progress begets more progress.

This is why President Arroyo is trying to implement the “A Million New Entrepreneurs Program” as the centerpiece of her economic agenda. Taking the cue, local governments have set up their own local enterprise promotion programs.

This is also why entrepreneurship subjects have been infused into the curriculum at both high school and collegiate levels.

… and why industry associations, civic clubs, and even religious groups have joined the “small business” bandwagon.

… and why this little corner makes a pitch for entrepreneurship.

And the pitch is addressed to you, kababayan/katoto/kapwa-Pilipino — whether you are a salaried employee, a housewife bored or hardpressed making ends meet, a graduate who can’t find a good job, a retiree, an OFW, or an expatriate Filipino.

The next pieces in this corner will discuss more about the advocacy for entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurial personality, starting a business, improving a business, and entrepreneurial role models.

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About the Author Annamanila is Myrna Rodriguez-Co, a professional writer and editor who has over 50 books and periodicals on entrepreneurship and small enterprise management to her name. The latest of these are the four-volume Dreamers, Doers, Risk-takers entrepreneurial case story series of the UP Institute for Small-Scale Industries, a two-volume series on technology-based entrepreneurs of the Department of Science and Technology, and a two-volume series on agrarian reform programs and beneficiaries of the Department of Agrarian Reform. She edited the Small Business Entreprenews magazine which won an Anvil Award as best external publication many years ago. She had a four-year consultancy stint with the Development Bank of the Philippines, handling communication and promotion for its ISSEP lending project. Recently retired from the ISSI, she was retained by the office as publication and publicity consultant even as she contributes regularly to the Philippine Daily Inquirer small business features section and occasionally to the Sunday Inquirer Magazine. She is mom to six grown-up children and grandma to a toddler. She maintains a personal blogsite at http://ode2old.blogspot.com whose theme-philosophy -- "the best is yet to be" -- she tries to keep faith with with blow-hot-blow-cold fervor. Read more from this author

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