As the Department of Agriculture’s Philippine Rural Development Project (DA PRDP) implements subprojects towards agro-industrial enterprise development, entrepreneurship capacity building activities for farmer cooperatives and associations are also being conducted.

Held last August 22-23 in Baguio City, farmer cooperatives from Mt. Province with ongoing I-REAP (Enterprise Development) subprojects funded under the PRDP were trained on enterprise development.

According to Myrna I. Basanes, PRDP Business Development Officer, proponent groups (PGs) should be able to understand entrepreneurship, review effective organizational change management strategies, and develop tools for enterprise strategic, financial and production planning schemes that will improve the operations and management of their enterprise subprojects and their cooperatives as well.

The two-day training on enterprise development was facilitated by Nellie Capuyan-Ballola, a Corporate Social Responsibility Consultant and a community development practitioner for over 30 years now.

Ballola discussed topics on personal entrepreneurial competencies, marketing, good housekeeping, and organization and management. Coupled with interactive group exercises such as simulations among others, the participants were able to complete the two-day training successfully.

“This training is actually very timely since we are about to start the operation of our enterprise subproject on coffee,” said Lilian Biswilen, Manager of Besao Multi-purpose Cooperative, the lead proponent for the implementation of the Mt. Province Arabica Coffee Enterprise (MPACE).

“Every topic is useful not only to our organizations or to our businesses, especially to us as individuals,” Biswilan added.

Likewise, Kitayo Elizabeth, manager of Tadian Multi-purpose Cooperative said that the topics are applicable to all of them especially the five S of good housekeeping and the organizational management.

“It made me think of restructuring our policies and plan for long term developments,” she said.

The MPACE is a coffee enterprise subproject worth over 13 million, proposed by seven farmer cooperatives in Mt. Province shared by the World Bank, the National Government through the DA, the Provincial LGU, and the PGs. To date, all coffee equipment were already delivered to the PGs and the construction of buying stations as well which will soon be turned over to them.

A similar training will also be conducted for the PGs of I-REAP subprojects in Kalinga, Mountain Province, and Abra. (ELVY TAQUIO, RPCO-CAR InfoACE)