Reach Mindanao: Empowering Youth through Flexible Learning and Skills Building
The beneficiaries of this project are the children and young people from the most marginalized families in the three target municipalities in Maguindanao. They have little or no opportunity to continue education and lack the necessary skills to gain decent employment or engage in livelihood or enterprise activities. They are affected to varying degrees by on-and-off conflict, exposure to natural hazards and extreme poverty.
At this stage it will be difficult to quantify and come up with a breakdown of the beneficiaries. What we are clear is that the beneficiaries of this program are the marginalized youth who are not in school, not in education and not in training—they may come from different groups—indigenous families, Christians or Muslims—with varied backgrounds, they can be out-of-school, former child soldiers or formerly associated with armed conflict or groups; they can be young single mothers, or youth engaged in menial jobs/child labor, those who experience frequent displacements—who, at this stage is going to be difficult to quantify.
This project defines the criteria based on the above to ensure that the most marginalized youth are identified for the program. The market scan will help identify the skills that are most in-demand in the market and map the industries that are in need of these skills so that the project is able to offer and match the training with what is needed. The interest of the learners on the skills training program will also be an important consideration as this will also help define learners’ completion rate– and eventually, employment—whether self-employment through entrepreneurship or through waged employment with the business industries.
A total of 3,113 children and youth beneficiaries will be directly reached, through vocational-technical education, enterprise development training and flexible learning options that consider the personal circumstances of young people, in particular girls. 113 teachers from DepEd and training institutions will benefit from skills upgrading training and improved curriculum that consider the soft skills viewed by employers as necessary to increase productivity in the workplace.
Plan will ensure that girls and young women are included, and will strengthen acceptance and preference for girls’ education and economic empowerment. The immediate families are expected to benefit when these children and youth graduate from the program, get employed or are gainfully earning from their enterprises. The broader community and future students will likewise benefit in the long term with the teachers’ enhanced teaching skills. The VocTech facility improvement will translate into an improved learning environment enabling better learning outcomes for future learners.
Programme
In partnership with
