Business Affiliate Team Emerges in the Philippines
Despite the remarkable economic progress of the past 20 years, Asia is still home to nearly half of the world’s poor. For an emerging team of five business professionals in the Philippines, they won’t allow that to continue in their own backyard.
The Business Affiliate team members are intrigued by the opportunity to connect their Christian faith and business passions to end poverty.
Using their decades of experience in hotel and restaurant management, handicraft production, and branding and product development, they are now mentoring other Filipino entrepreneurs who seek to scale up their micro businesses.
We recently took the team on their first exploratory trip to Coron island in the Palawan region, visiting leaders and entrepreneurs in the emerging eco-tourism, food production, and hospitality industries. These entrepreneurs are clients of Center for Community Transformation (CCT) Credit Cooperative, a local partner of Partners Worldwide.
As we listened, we heard the dream of husband and wife duo, Minda and Manuel Esparaguera. They co-own and operate Aling Minda’s Ice Cream. With a 6th-grade and 2nd-grade education, respectively, they have been active clients of CCT for the past decade, but only recently began their ice cream business.
In just one year, they have grown the business—purchasing crucial equipment and increasing from one vending cart to five! They now employ seven people, who push the carts by foot around town to scout out the target customer base throughout each day.
Minda and Manuel’s dream is for their ice cream to be known and sold not only in the region of Palawan, but all over the Philippines! With the Business Affiliate team’s experience in branding and food distribution, ideas began bubbling to the surface.
Business Affiliates play a crucial role in our 3-way partnership model, as they mentor entrepreneurs like Minda and Manuel, and walk alongside leaders of our local partners like CCT. At Partners Worldwide, we work hard to onboard qualified and passionate Business Affiliates, matching the strengths of each one with the needs of the entrepreneurs in our global network.
Over the past 20 years, most Business Affiliates teams have been based in North America. However, the formation of this new team and two others in Southeast Asia represents Partners Worldwide’s initiative to become a more global network in every way.
With diverse cultural and contextual understanding, these teams within the region are ready and equipped to form long-term partnerships based on listening, learning, mutual trust, and respect.
Partners Worldwide seeks to propel more Business Affiliate teams and partnerships in Southeast Asia toward a future free of poverty. Do you share the dream to be a part of this?
October 12, 2017