CARD MRI

After the People Power Revolution in 1986, I together with 14 rural development practitioners, started to turn my vision of establishing a bank owned and managed by landless poor coconut farmers into reality. With a capital of twenty pesos, office with an old desk and three chairs, and an old and battered typewriter, the Center for Agriculture and Rural Development (CARD) was established. They started to develop a mix of training and livelihood activities for landless coconut workers in San Pab... lo City, Laguna under the Landless People’s Development Fund (LPDF). The training was the first of many time-bound projects back then, ranging from cow dispersal to deep-well installation. It was Professor Takayoshi Amenomori, then Secretary General of the Asia Community Trust (ACT), who gave CARD its first program support of USD20,000. Eventually, they saw that the interventions they did not have a sustainable effect on the communities they were serving. The LPDF project then allowed me and my colleagues to rethink and re-imagine their ways of addressing poverty in the country’s most economically depressed areas. They all understood that moving out from the claws of poverty takes more than just training and livelihood assistance. They realized that people need a way to build assets. With assets, people can build capital and it is only through the ownership and control of capital that a variety of forms of empowerment can emerge.More