By RALPH JOHN MIJARES
ROXAS City — Councilor Cesar Yap Jr. encouraged investors to put up “social businesses” in partnership with the government.
Yap said this is a way to let the poor feel the country’s much-touted economic progress.
In spite of the increase in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), the poor “do not get their fair share of the progress,” he said.
The councilor said the GDP is up by seven percent, but “ngaa indi mabatyagan sang mga poor (why can’t the poor feel it)?”
A concept dubbed “Public-Private-Poor Partnership” — a combination of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program and public-private partnership — may help, he said.
Through this scheme, the city government will encourage investors to put up business here.
Investors will hire management personnel and give poor beneficiaries stock certificates.
Upon return of investment, investors will sign the stock certificates and the beneficiaries will start getting their dividends, as the enterprise is handed over to the poor.
Yap said the Nobel Peace Prize-winning professor Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh inspired this idea.
Yunus put up a social business in Bangladesh, where there was a high malnutrition rate among children, by selling low-priced yogurt.
He collaborated with the French dairy company Danone for the project.
The yogurt brand “Shokti doi,” actually a Bengali word for energy, had small factories set up in small communities, with the locals as suppliers and sellers.
Yap said he will file a resolution on the matter soon./PN
