Blueprint for a New Philippines - Part Fourteen

By Cesar Lumba

While I was busy making plans and offering recommendations - and while I was sleeping - people have been busy in the Philippines making things happen.  And when such people are the biggest movers and shakers, the results are truly amazing.

(The above paragraph is an obvious allusion to the first chapter in Thomas Friedman's classic The World is Flat.  The title of that chapter is "While I was Sleeping..."  While he was sleeping, the world was flattening, wrote Friedman.  Third world countries were catching up with America, and now the playing field is level.  The world is flat.)

There's a new organization that has captured the imagination of a lot of Filipino technocrats in the New York area, in Los Angeles and other parts of the globe.  Called GILAS, which is an acronym for Gearing Up for Internet Literacy and Access for Students, this new all-volunteer organization is spearheaded by the Ayala Foundation in the Philippines and supported by other foundations, political leaders, educators and major coporations, including the media giant GMA-Inquirer.

Google has even gotten in on the action, donating free pop-up advertising that is spreading the word.

Already there are novel approaches to education that have been made possible.  A Fil-Am art teacher from the midwest has offered to teach an art course for free over the 'net.  Students in high schools now connected to the internet can benefit from this.  And it is only the start.  When all public high schools in the Philippines are on line, other courses can be taught by experts and professionals living in remote corners of the world.

100% of public school students in Taiwan, Singapore and Hongkong are now connected to the internet.  In five years, if GILAS achieves its goal, the Philippines will be one such country.

There is so much buzz about Gilas, achieved over a relatively short period of time, that it has emerged, along with Gawad Kalinga, as one of the biggest star constellations in the Philippine firmament.

Vicky Garchitorena, President of Ayala Foundation and the point person in America for the growing movement:  "Launched in January 2005, GILAS has by year-end connected 727 schools.  The program is now estimated to reach 350,000 young Filipinos who can ahieve computer and internet literacy before they go out to join the workforce.  Such skills, now considered an essential qualification for almost any job, will help these underprivileged youths in getting better paying jobs, so that they can escape and perhaps even break the cycle of poverty they may find themselves in."

There are 5500 public high schools in the Philippines, which puts in perspective the massive challenge that GILAS has undertaken.  The goal of the movement is to provide computers and internet connectivity to all public high schools by 2010.  To achieve this, chapters are being set up in the global Filipino community to function as conduits for donations and pledges, and as drum beaters.  The world's Foundations are also being targeted for much needed financial and/or in-kind support.

Filipinos all over the world buy a lot of computers run by Windows and other Microsoft software, so maybe, just maybe, the Gates Foundation would like to partner with GILAS in the task of empowering Filipino high school students.  After all, the Gates Foundation is now at the forefront of the fight against AIDS, against poverty in Africa and other regions.  Adding Philippine public high schools to its growing list of beneficiaries will be the other shoe in Asia.  Gates has already dropped one shoe in India, lavishing contributions to India's huge pipeline of private donated money to further develop high-tech in that country.  The Philippines is generally known as India's minor partner in the international call center and outsourced software development business.  By infusing money into Philippine high schools, Gates would create another potentially huge future source of call center and high tech talent.

I have volunteered to help out in New York, and the few fellow volunteers I have talked to were initially attracted to the project because it seeks to empower Fillipinos.  Like many Filipinos in the so-called diaspora, we have grown weary of throwing charitable contributions into what seems to be a bottomless pit in the Philippines.  Every year, there's a typhoon, or an earthquake, or a mud slide, and we find ourselves straining to empty our wallets.

Disasters happen everywhere, and with global warming (despite some American politicians' cynicism) is threatening to cause a future barrage of catacysmic events.  It is better to empower the Filipino youth now, so they can help themselves in the future, than to open up our wallets every year ad infinitum because each disaster cripples the Philippine government and overwhelms its infrastructure.

GILAS, while not the only one, offers a chance for Filipino students to grow up and be productive members not only of the Philippine workforce, but also of the world's.  Their capacity to learn having made a quantum leap through the introduction of internet connectivity to their lives, the Filipino youth will be much better prepared to seek and gain employment in the 21st century global knowledge economy.  They may even set up start-ups that will grow into high-tech world beaters 

The resultant rise in their standard of living and the increased awareness they will have gained from the internet will allow the youth to make better decisions on how and where they live - away from mud-packed mountain sides, in urban centers where they are sheltered away from the ravages of the increasingly brutal typhoons - and the careers that they choose.  The movement away from agriculture to the knowledge economy, bypassing the more traditional rust-belt economy, will be accelerated by the success of GILAS.

Capitalizing on the nationalism of most Filipinos in the global community, GILAS is betting that when sufficiently informed of the goals and achievements of the new movement, many Filipinos would want to contribute their time and/or resources to the project.  It was a winning bet.  Everyboy who hears about GILAS wants to help.  It started as a fund-raising project, it is now a movement.

Because GILAS is an all-volunteer army and all overhead costs are borne by the Ayala Foundation and some major Philippine corporations, all monies contributed to GILAS go directly to the purchase of computers and internet connectivity.

It costs $6000 to purchase computers and internet connectivity for one high school in the Philippines.  A couple of weeks ago, the SGV Alumni Association in the New York area held a fund-raising dinner for GILAS and collected $6000.  The founder of SGV, Washington Sycip, pledged an additional $6000.  That means two public high schools will now be added to the fast-growing list of high schools where students will be able to gain internet literacy.

A Filipino venture capitalist in the Los Angeles area was so impressed by Vicky Garchitorena's presentation that he pledged $100,000 in quarterly payments over three years.  That is a potential $1.2 million, which will finance the needs of 200 public high schools.  Everywhere Vicky turns, wallets are being opened.  Global Filipinos are looking for worthwhile projects to support.  Her timing is perfect.  Filipinos want to believe that the Philippines is not hopeless, as the naysayers warn, and that they are somehow key.

Leo Legaspi, the point person in New York, relates the wonderment of some high school sutdents when they came face-to-face with the amazing capabilities of their new technology.

To demonstrate the power of the internet, GILAS volunteers in New York arranged a Voice over the Internet Telephony (VoIP) call from Secaucus, New Jersey to Kapitolyo High School in Pasig.  Using e-bay's Skype, volunteer Bert Aguilera addressed the students in the high school, "Kumusta na po kayo?"

Bert chatted with the students and then with the computer teacher in the high school.  Ms. Leni Daniel and her students were amazed at how people could talk to each other over a distance of 8500 miles with no long distance charges or the use of prepaid phone cards.

I mentioned the Gawad Kalinga project in passing.  It is another privately funded project that has become a movement.  At a cost of P50,000 ($1000) each, houses are being built on donated land in the Philippines for slum dwellers.  That, too, has inspired legions of global Fillipinos - and even non-Filipinos.  Entire villages are springing up literally overnight and giving shelter to Filipino families who used to live in one-room cardboard shanties in the slums of the Philippines.

Taken together, the GILAS and Gawad Kalinga projects will eventually give a lie to the cynical observation that the Philippines is a permanent basket case, the sick man of Asia who can't seem to get out of his own way.

No siree, not with the 8 million and counting in the Philippine diaspora volunteering their time and resources to nation building in the old country.

(The picture shows Ms. Vicky Garchitorena, Ayala Foundation President, and some of the volunteers in the New York area.  Some in the picture are New York point man Leo Legaspi, Joseph Tieng, Rene Enriquez,  Nelsie Parado, Robert P de Tagle, and yours truly.)