Appeal to Congress: Prioritize social enterprise bill

We are calling on legislators to prioritize the passage of the Poverty Reduction Through Social Entrepreneurship (PRESENT) bill to help more Filipinos recover faster from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The PRESENT Coalition, which is supported by Oxfam Pilipinas through the “Gender Transformative and Responsible Agribusiness Investments in South-East Asia” program, said the proposed policy measure aims to promote social entrepreneurship as a strategy for poverty reduction. If passed, it will enable the creation and strengthening of social enterprises as transformational partners of the poor and marginalized.

Despite the comprehensive assistance given by social enterprises to the communities that they serve—from training and jobs creation to entrepreneurship support and market intermediation—they still face many challenges with the current policy environment.

In Mindanao, for example, the social enterprise Coffee for Peace has helped farmers, many of them from indigenous groups, develop high-quality coffee (through local innovations) that are not only export quality but have also gained a local following. Through such intervention, more local farmers have entered entrepreneurship and are now sought after by different markets.

Before the previous Congress ended, the Senate committee on trade, commerce, and entrepreneurship had already directed the creation of a technical working group to reconcile the various versions of the proposed bill filed in the Senate.

A study by the Philippine Social Enterprise Network and the British Council, supported by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, showed that there were around 164,000 social enterprises (more than 15 percent of all businesses) in the country before the pandemic. In 2020, a succeeding study by the Institute for Social Entrepreneurship in Asia showed that 55 percent of social enterprises experienced major downturns; 41 percent experienced some setbacks, and only 4 percent reported any positive impact.

Besides urging the deliberation of the social entrepreneurship bill in Congress, the PRESENT Coalition will also be working with the executive branch to mainstream provisions of the bill in government programs, even while the bill is being deliberated in Congress and local government units to develop localized social enterprise programs to assist the sector recover and build back fairer.

Poverty Reduction through Social Entrepreneurship Coalition