FORMOSO, CHRISTOPHER

ECON401SU
Final Paper Farmer na, Lider pa: A Program for Self-help and
Entrepreneurship
Introduction
All great organizations have great leaders. Our history books are filled by
accounts of people overcoming great challenges and living great success. Yet,
we live our lives merely trying to acquire their external qualities instead of striving
to be like them. We forget what made them great is within; the beliefs and
mindset, which made them strive to become great. We place them on pedestals
surrendering we cannot be like them. We could not be more wrong.
Leadership is a skill. And like any other skill, it needs to be cultivated. Leadership
is when we take responsibility for our problems and consistently act toward
overcoming them. It has neither to do with innate talent or title. Great success for
our organizations can only come from great leadership of our people.
Why is it not a priority or a big component of aid programs whose aim is to uplift
the lives of people? I might not have an answer to this question but my proposal
for the Farmer Na, Lider Pa! program is to fill what I believe is the gap in
community development programs. To build robust and economically successful
communities, we need to focus on the development of its people. The program
hopes to empower farmers and community leaders by shifting their mindset and
developing their human capital.
Program Rationale
Most aid programs are ready solutions to what seem to be the problems of their
beneficiaries. According to the farmers in Leyte, the main problems would be
farm inputs, technologies and market linkages. And to an extent, the local
government has been successful in addressing these needs and creating
successful communities like Barangay Conzoilo. But could it be that Barangay

Conzoilo benefitted from an already great leader and all that was left was to
provide them all the resources necessary to push their communitys growth
exponentially? Seeing that their farmer associations leader was the president of
the provincial farmers association and the barangay captain, maybe. This for me
was enough to build the hypothesis of building community leaders will lead to
larger sustainable benefits for the entire community.
History teaches us the same. Saemaul Undong (SMU), Koreas rural
development program in the 1960s, is attributed to be the foundation for their
success as a nation today. A big component to SMUs success was in the
development of village leaders. They would be brought to leadership centers for
skills training and ideas exchange instilling in them the attitudes of self-help and
cooperation. The program empowered its people to create positive change for
their lives and their communities. Their fates were in their hands, not the
government.
Program Objectives
The program objectives are three-fold. The first is to shift the mindsets of the
community leaders from a doll-out focus to a value creation focus. The second is
to increase their production efficiency, capacity, adoption of business processes,
and increase potential customers. The third and final aim is to turn the students
into teachers, from mentees to mentors. Farmer na, Lider pa, Titser pa!
Key metrics are as follows:

Self-driven prospect ideas- Participants will be surveyed. Given their

current problems, list down all their ideas in solving these problems.

Solutions they can immediately act on are counted.

Production- Pre-program survey for production efficiency. Input-output to

be compared at the end of program or workshop.

Market- Pre-program survey for existing market linkages to be compared

to new or potential market linkages after program.

Participation rates- for workshops versus target community population

Conversion rates- Mentorship applications vs Participation of workshops.

And Mentorship success rates.

Program Design
The program has three phases. 1) Community identification, selection and
assessment. 2) Workshops. 3) Mentorship Program.
The first phase Community identification, selection and assessment is
focused up finding the right pilot community to target and assessing its needs.
Criteria would include but not be limited to new farmer associations with minimal
if any existing aid, income levels, density and proximity to urban centers and
cluster density of the area with similar community characteristics. This phase
would also involve the identification and training of local volunteer leaders to
become mentors.
The second phase Workshops would be the creation of short (1 to 8
sessions) courses based on the needs assessment of the farming
community/area. Workshops are projects-based designed to solve specific
problems providing participants with practical tools and techniques to gather
data, measure results and troubleshoot. The workshops will cost a minimal fee to
anchor value but also cover learning materials and meals for participants.
Though technical in nature, the workshops are meant to instill the importance of
self-help when explaining the concepts behind technical tools.
Based on their projects and commitment, the top students will be eligible to apply
for a longer-term (six months to a year) mentorship program. The third phase
Mentorship program would be a collection of training on leadership,
entrepreneurship and farming based on the students personal goals and
mentors expertise. The mentees will be required to implement a project within 1
week of consultation with the mentor. The emphasis is on the implementation and
the iteration of the program as the students training evolves. The emphasis for

the mentor becomes instilling the values of cooperation in moving projects

forward.
Challenges
The program has two main elements key to its success: students and teachers.
In order to attract participants, the workshops and the program as a whole must
be able to solve real world problems participants have thus the importance of the
needs assessment. The challenge comes in being able to identify and judge the
true needs of a community without the community only trying to take advantage.
The other component the teachers will also be a challenge to attract
committed volunteers willing to give time and care to these communities without
any financial reward.
Lastly, the programs challenge is in creating a sustainable source of volunteers
and financial supporters. The value the program creates is designed to bear fruit
in the longer term and measuring the direct response from the programs
becomes more difficult. While on the other hand, to garner support from funding
more often than not they will ask for more short term results from the program as
funding tends to be short term as well.
Closing
The importance of developing leaders and leadership skills of communities has
been highly underestimated. I believe leadership development would bear larger
returns than any other aid program in the long run despite its lack of hard
metrics. Saemaul Undongs success was not from the metrics it presented but in
the faith it put in the Korean people. The only real way forward is to develop our
human potential one farmer, one leader and teacher at a time.