Urban Youth Entrepreneurship Project

Disadvantaged Urban Youth Entrepreneurship, Organic Vegetable Production, Food Processing and Marketing Project

During this period, we continued with the conduct of additional meetings and information drive in order to include additional youths for the project. During the mid-term period, we have reached-out to 280 youths and this time we were able to cover 78 more.  This will be our final beneficiaries for the project (358 youths). The 78 youths are doing their vegetable gardening activities with the 280 youths who are continuing theirs. Instead of the plan to also include 2 other cities (Iligan and Cagayan de Oro) we decided to stick to Dipolog City only for logistical and administrative reasons. We were able to distribute additional 78 information packets and vegetable gardening manual, 215 seed packets and 78 sets of garden tools. The garden tools set include sprinkler, water container, pail, weeding tool, cultivator and hoe.

We are also establishing a 2,000 square meter vegetable seed production area in Canibungan, Dipolog City with the aim of self-sufficiency in vegetable seed production using our own local seed sources. One of the major expense of the project is vegetable seeds and we think we cannot be sustainable if we continue this so better produce our own. So far we are able to grow and produce vegetable seeds of legumes, okra, tomato, eggplant and moringa.

The project team working on this project is still composed of Annie Jane Lagawan, Benjie Cabiladas, 2 youth volunteers coming from the Philippine National Volunteer Service Agency and myself.

We are on the process of forming the youth clusters and we have already conducted 3 cluster formation and organizational trainings with 40 youth leaders.  We are also preparing for the conduct of vegetable-based cooking and food preparation training for the youth as well as the distribution of cooking utensils for the selected youth entrepreneurs. Marketing activities of vegetable-based products from the youth will also commence.  Update of these activities will be done on the final reporting period.

This project is implemented by the Association of Locally-Empowered Youth in Northern Mindanao (ALEY-NM) with support from the ABCDE Foundation.