DECEMBER News /

YES Philippines Coordinator Awarded Youth and ICT Award by Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP)

Congratulations to Ms. Audrey Codera, for winning the prestigious Youth and ICT Award in the 2005 Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP) Awards. Ms. Codera is the Executive Director of Philippine Youth Employment Network (PYEN) and Country Coordinator of YES Philippines Network,. The Youth and ICT Awards recognized eight young social entrepreneurs from different regions of the world who have transformed social development opportunities into a sustainable social enterprise through innovative use of information communication technologies (ICTs).

Audrey gained this prominent award for her work on the Community-Based Youth Entrepreneurship Program (CYEP) in the Philippines.  Through this project, she has taken the global issue of youth unemployment, and is addressing it utilizing the inherent resources and existing conditions in individual communities within the Philippines.  She hopes to achieve the project’s overall objective of alleviating youth poverty by creating sustainable employment opportunities for them at the local level.  The project aims to do so by helping the young entrepreneur create his/her own business through a three pronged approach consisting of:

• Skills and enterprise development training  - initially a training on the Basic Entrepreneurship Development Course (BEDC) which is a workshop on business planning
• Access to micro-credit and
• Linkages to business mentors. 

With the help of local youth groups, the CYEP has been able to replicate its model in many local areas nationwide in a relatively short time.  The project has encountered some obstacles, of which access to micro financing is a principle one, but so too has it enjoyed great success.   In fact, one of the graduates of the Tondo BEDC was able to set up his won sub-dealership for Unilever through the support of this project.  He now has two Unilever stalls and a Unilever cart he uses to sell his products to his community.

When asked in the GKP Award interview what most interests her about her work, Audrey replied, “I call it globalization. You look at the problem from the global perspective, but solve it utilizing the inherent resources and qualities the locality has. I get to have the global perspective of the issue, the possible solutions considering the information I am able to obtain locally and bring about the solution where its needed, and share it with the international community. If that isn’t interesting, I don’t know what is.”