 |
| Participants in the consultation pose with Secretary Cacdac |
Migrant Workers Secretary Hans Leo Cacdac today urged OFWs to plan on putting up a business while still working abroad to take advantage of various programs offered by the government to improve their chances of success.
Encouraging OFWs to go into business is among various efforts of the Department of Migrant Workers’ Reintegration program to provide OFWs a smooth transition when they return to the Philippines.
“We will all go back to our country,” he said during a consultation with Filipino community leaders in Hong Kong at the Island Shangri-la Hotel.
 |
| DETAILS HERE |
Entrepreneurship is one of the reintegration strategies
adopted by DMW to enable OFWs to easily transition to life in the Philippines when
they go home for good.
The Department of Trade and Industry, for example, has been
connecting small businesses to SM malls where they are offered small booths to
sell their products through product fairs.
The Department of Agriculture, on the other hand, welcomes small
businesses under its Kadiwa Store program, which buys farmers’ produce directly
to bring down the cost of food to consumers, either as suppliers or as operators
of Kadiwa stores in their communities.
| . |
 |
The Department of Tourism also has a program that can help
owners of properties in potential tourist areas by helping them turn these into
tourist-grade accommodations, to be sold worldwide through the AirB&B
platform, he said.
In addition, he said, the Pag-IBIG Fund has a special
housing program, the Expanded 4PH Program, offering lower-cost houses and a
more affordable repayment scheme for housing loans it extends to OFWs.
 |
| PINDUTIN DITO |
To inspire OFWs to seriously think of going into business, DMW has launched the Reintegration One-Stop Shop, a website that features the programs that OFWs can take advantage of as well as OFWs who have since turned into entrepreneurs (click here to go to the page: https://dmw.gov.ph/reintegration).
A highlight of this campaign is the LIKHA series of business
plan competitions to women (LIKHAng Kababaihan), seafarers (LIKHAng Marino) and
land-based OFWs around the world ((LIKHAng Global) which all offer a prize of
P500,000 to the winner as seed capital.
 |
| Basahin ang detalye! |
These competitions encourage OFWs to generate business ideas, examine their feasibility and study ways to make them profitable. This way, even if they do not win in the competitions, they get insights that inspire them to aspire for business.
“What is important is they have plans,” Cacdac said.
