Monday, March 03, 2008 Editorial: Wanted: good news
LATABAN, Liloan is a good place to have a flat tire, if only because the hapless motorist can seek out Rosalinda Tundag.
Rosalinda, 39, is a housewife who washes clothes, irons, cleans the house and takes care of husband Asprin and their two children. She also can vulcanize a flat tire in less than 30 minutes.
Rosalinda and Asprin run a vulcanizing shop from their home, serving at least 10 customers a day on an average, more during weekends. While Asprin earns about P1,000 a day ferrying passengers on his motorcycle, Rosalinda contributes P300, her average daily earnings from vulcanizing.
Through hard work and “disciplined savings,” the Tundags bought on cash a brand new compressor to improve their shop’s efficiency. A member of the Cebu Micro Enterprise Development Foundation Inc. (CMEDFI), Rosalinda also applied for a loan to raise goats, chickens and hogs in their backyard.
After successfully repaying her loan, she plans to expand the family’s income by also selling wood, charcoal and new tires.
Looking for inspiration
For initiating and sustaining a home-based economy, Rosalinda Tundag was one of the entrepreneurs featured in “Beyond the Seed Money: Business Success in the Grassroots.”
Written by Marivir Montebon, the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc. (Rafi) publication singles out the most outstanding of some 8,000 clients assisted by CMEDFI. The Rafi-established microfinance institution grants micro loans to women on the basis of character and track record. Despite serving clients who were not formally schooled in business, CMEDFI “currently disburses P256 million in loans, with P30.9 million (as) outstanding loan balance and a repayment rate of 98 percent.”
CMEDFI re-echoes the Grameen Bank’s revolutionary banking system of giving the marginalized access to capital, with only the social “collaterals” of “mutual trust, accountability, participation and creativity.”
No armchair feminist, Rosalinda has never allowed traditional gender perceptions to color her regard for the dignity of hard work and honest living. She has plowed her family’s farm in Zamboanga del Sur, improved her vulcanizing to answer the doubts of new customers, and now teaches her daughter to keep house and vulcanize tires.
From the institutional and personal perspectives, the successes of CMEDFI and Rosalinda Tundag are valuable to share with a public in need of inspiration and heroes.
Media initiative
Given the competition for information and agenda in today’s media, government, nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and other development stakeholders need to be proactive in their media advocacy.
During the Feb. 11 seminar-workshop on “Understanding and Dealing with the Media,” the Rafi staff and invited journalists discussed how developing media literacy will enable social institutions to not only draw media coverage but contribute messages that can inform, assist or motivate the audience to pursue a personal or communal good.
In the 1990s, the Barefoot Media Initiative initiated in Cebu trainings to equip NGO workers and sectoral representatives with the understanding and skills for relaying messages through newspapers, radio and TV stations.
With the widespread popularity of the online portal, development stakeholders now must respond to the new challenges of convergence: acquiring media literacy to respond to the traditional and online portals, as well as not waiting for and reacting only to media coverage but contributing to media content and shaping the public agenda.
Most importantly, the opportunities for greater media participation imply responsibilities for stakeholders. Media advocacy must uphold newsworthiness over media spin, the common good over narrow and hidden interests, transparency and accountability over corporate public relations.
