NGOs helping boost peace process in South

COTABATO CITY — There are foreign-funded non-government organizations (NGOs) silently helping develop war-ravaged areas covered by the ceasefire in the South.

Most of the NGOs’ projects focus on providing livelihood skills to the residents, mostly out-of-school youths, of these impoverished communities to complement the peace process.

In Central Mindanao alone, 211 Muslim and Christian out-of-school youths, many of them children of Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) rebels, graduated last year from the livelihood skills training program of the US-funded Assistance for the Comprehensive Educational Development of Mindanao (ASCEND).

ASCEND operates with the help of the Save the Children Federation Inc. and the Mindanao Business Council, which helps find jobs for these graduates of courses on mobile phone repair, small gasoline engine maintenance, practical electricity, banana propagation, and baking.

Most of the 211 graduates hail from remote barangays in Datu Piang, Maguindanao and Midsayap, North Cotabato, both towns badly affected by military-MILF hostilities in 2000.

"The graduates of the training program of ASCEND are now themselves actively involved in disseminating to the people in their respective communities the need to support the Mindanao peace process for the unemployed to have jobs and do away with the traditional carrying of firearms as a status symbol," said Datu Piang Mayor Hadji Samer Uy.

John Rey Ardeña was once advised to become a militiaman in Midsayap if he wanted to get "employed." Now he is a motorcycle mechanic, working in a shop along the national highway in his hometown.

"I can now contribute two kilos of rice daily to our home to ease the burden of my parents in feeding my younger siblings," Ardeña told The STAR in the Hiligaynon dialect.

Moctar Urag, 23, now has a small cellular phone repair shop at the town proper of Datu Piang, a known MILF stronghold in the second district of Maguindanao.

"Before I used to spend my free time only playing basketball with friends. Now I work the whole day and end up counting my earnings before closing my shop at sunset," Urag said in the Maguindanaon vernacular.

At the boundary of Datu Piang and Midsayap, dozens of ASCEND trainees in banana propagation are themselves now helping the military and local MILF rebels enforce the ceasefire in areas where they have demonstration farms to prevent hostilities that could disrupt their on-site agricultural training.

ASCEND is just one of dozens of NGOs silently helping foster tranquility in Mindanao through humanitarian projects in supposedly hostile communities.

With the help of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a total of 7,634 out-of-school youths, mostly children of marginalized Moro and Christian farmers, completed various vocational courses in 2005 through a common project of different NGOs dubbed Accreditation and Equivalency Support Program for Children and Youth in Mindanao (ACCESS-Mindanao).

The project was jointly implemented by five NGOs, including the Notre Dame Foundation for Charitable Activities Inc.-Women in Enterprise Development (NDFCAI-WED), a pioneer in socio-economic interventions in poor Moro and Christian communities.

The NDFCAI-WED began its peace-building activities, through humanitarian projects, in remote towns in the South long before the forging of the Sept. 2, 1996 peace pact between the government and the Moro National Liberation Front.

Inspired by the accomplishments of these NGOs, many other entities, some of them funded by the Canadian International Development Agency, the Australian Aid, the Spanish-funded International Labor Organization, and the European Union, have lately been implementing various projects in areas where there are MILF forces to complement the peace process.