City Hall, foundation partner to train teachers, youth leaders

By: Emme Rose Santiagudo

THE Iloilo City government and the Ayala Foundation Inc. (AFI) rolled out another public-private partnership (PPP) on Thursday for two training projects for teachers, school heads, and youth leaders in the city.

Mayor Jerry Treñas led the signing of the memorandum of agreement (MOA) with AFI, which was represented by its president Ruel Marangan and Attorney-in-Fact Joanna Maria Duarte, on Thursday at the Penthouse of the City Hall.

The two training projects will commence in 2020.

The two projects are the Leadership Communities (LEADCOM), a 12-month program that aims to empower youth leaders including Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) Officers; while the Centex Training Institute will train teachers and school heads for a three-year mentorship program.

“Our training for our youth leaders, we gather youth leaders in barangay. We train them with servant leadership, project management, and then entrepreneur skills to come up with their own project. What we do is we are the platform to help them figure out, scout the community, tingnan nila kung ano yung mga problema and find the solutions for them,” Duarte explained.

According to Duarte, the projects can focus on several issues such as environment, social enterprise, and health among others.

The LEADCOM will also involve the partnership of the local government unit (LGU).

“It is always in partnership with the LGU to help us with the sustainability of the project and also help the youth leader by telling them what are the major problems in the community,” she stressed.

Meanwhile, the Centex Training Institute will be an intensive training and mentoring program for teachers and school heads.

“We will do intensive training for three to four days and then after that we come back every quarter and we mentor, we observe para whatever we teach will be a habit,” Duarte said.

With the advent of technology, Marangan emphasized that teachers have critical roles in training the students.

“Given the advent of technology, we are also looking into it on how we could leverage and maximize this both for the teachers who are instrumental in guiding their students. The teachers are very critical to be able to engage, train and really inspire students so we will have more productive students in the end,” he stressed.

At the end of the training, Duarte said that they hope to come up with more inspired teachers who will find it easier to teach learners and encourage the children to become attentive in class.

“We want to train their teaching skills so that whatever they teach, wherever they go, they will be very effective teachers,” she noted.

Meanwhile, Treñas lauded the partnership with AFI, emphasizing that the city can move forward through public private partnership (PPP).

“This is a very clear indication that here in Iloilo City we have a very strong public-private partnership. I believe that it is only thru the public-private partnership that we can move the city forward and that is the reason why city council and other stakeholders are very open with agreements like this,” he said.