Back to the Tondo district, by Smokey Mountain, this time to visit the Ayala Foundation’s Centex programme. It’s a pilot school, founded in 1998 which is run by the Ayala Foundation and the government to provide an excellent education to poor children who qualify for a place after special selection tests. The plan is to establish a methodology that works, to improve the teacher training and then to export it to other schools.
The school chooses 75 new students every year. Once a student has been accepted, he or she receives transport money, uniforms and shoes, lunch every day and specially designed textbooks. The Centex school day is longer than at other schools from 8.00 to 3.00 and there are 35 teachers for 500 students. That means 25 students per classroom which is a huge contrast to the public schools where the numbers can be as high as 600. Teachers also get an additional 2000 pesos added to their monthly salaries and they are trained by in-house teacher trainers and mentors, funded by Ayala.
In terms of curriculum, Centex has incorporated self-esteem as a subject which deals with things like conflict resolution skills, identifying problems and solutions. Parents also get special training on the subject of ‘discipline with dignity’ with the motto ‘praise in public and correct in private’. Students stay in the school until the 6th grade (12 years old) and are then matched up to a secondary school.
In stark contrast to the Centex school, we next visit a public school, the Antonio Villegas Vocational High School. It is in Tondo, not far from the temporary warehouse housing we visited a week ago. As soon as we walked in, students exploded into noise, some of it jeering, all of it loud! There are 2,235 students in this school, 64 teachers, which means 25 students per class. The school curriculum provides 6 professional subjects: garments, food technology, cosmetology for the girls, automotive technology, building construction and electronics technology for the boys. The school partners with companies so that the employment rate on leaving is high.
We are visiting because this school is a beneficiary of Ayala’s GILAS programme, which brings internet literacy to public schools. All 2nd year students upwards have internet lessons, with one computer for every 3 students.
The school staff then serve us a delicious lunch at 10.00 a.m. A huge plate of white rice and fried fish and bananas, and a very fragrant and delicious soup of chicken, papaya and green pepper leaves. It is called Tinolang Manoch soup and was Dr Rizal’s favourite dish. Dr Rizal is the Philippine’s national hero: a doctor, a poet and a freedom-fighter, shot at dawn by the Spanish in 1896 for suspected treason.
We get in a taxi to ‘Smokey Mountain’ a former rubbish dump site alongside which a slum has grown up. This is the Tondo district: one of the poorest in Manila. We are joining Entrepreneurs du Monde (EdM), a French NGO specialising in microfinance, on a visit to their local partner,‘Uplift’.
We meet our first microcredit clients (EdM calls them partners), both owners of tiny convenience shops – ‘sari sari’ stalls. In both cases, the loans are for 5,000 pesos, (around £63) to buy products. There is no bookkeeping material in one shop – the ‘sales invoices’ were square pieces of paper with amounts pierced onto a nail in the corner and a rolled-up, ink-smudged list turned out to be his bill for goods from the shopping mall. Uplift’s Livelihood and Development officer explained that the shopkeeper is a new borrower and that he should and would be keeping accounts, but that meanwhile that they knew and trusted him. It is clear that social capital and character analysis figures highly in the risk assessment performed by these tiny MFIs.
at and drink. This would enable the family to raise the money to pay for the funeral (PHP 50,000, around £700).