Manila, March 8, 2023–Trainers from select regional offices of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) gathered in Makati to learn about the content and how to deliver the enhanced Youth Entrepreneurship Program (YEP) module of the Department in a three-day workshop organized by the Education Development Center (EDC) with support from USAID.
The new module titled, ‘YEP! You Can Be Your Own Boss,’ now adds soft skills and design thinking content into DTI’s YEP. This new content was adopted from EDC through the USAID Opportunity 2.0 program which seeks to make entrepreneurship programs and services in the Philippines more accessible to out-of-school youth (OSY) and more responsive to their diverse conditions and circumstances.
As part of strengthening youth-serving systems at DTI, the Opportunity 2.0 program organized a training of DTI’s Master Trainers. This will prepare DTI to scale up and roll out this new module to Filipino OSY across the country who are budding entrepreneurs. The training of trainers will reach approximately 80 DTI trainers from covered regions.
In May 2021, USAID and DTI entered an agreement to collaborate on entrepreneur preparation programs and pilot these in select cities. Since the agreement signing, relevant materials and curricula have been reviewed followed by a co-development workshop to contextualize new business readiness content for DTI. National training workshops for DTI trainers on the content and delivery of these new content were also conducted in July 2021 and February 2022, respectively. Design thinking for entrepreneurship boot camps were also held with DTI in Tagbilaran, Legazpi, and Cagayan de Oro.
DTI, seeing the value of EDC’s additions into YEP, has rolled this out to communities beyond USAID’s program coverage. Over 2,100 out-of-school youth have completed Be Your Own Boss in partner cities while 500 more have been trained outside the sites covered by the program.#
