How I Experienced the UN SDGs First Hand Through The ASEAN Business Network in the Philippines
The start of bantu’s journey to bring the Singapore flag 🇸🇬 into the Philippines 🇵🇭
It has been our dream and purpose that one day we would be able to empower millions of lives across Asia and probably throughout the world. So one may ask, why do we want to do this? The answer is simple. Our single vision to help uplift the social sector in their capacity building, productivity, and to empower them to be more efficient to champion for their social causes.
I would say that it is neither an easy task nor a quick solution to bring societal problems to an end. However, it is our optimistic mindset, courageous act, and determination as human beings that gave us motivation to continue to press on social issues and overcome them beyond boundaries.
So here I share with you my journey to the Philippines.
Doing Good Comes From The Heart
When I first landed in Manila, I was fascinated by how friendly the people were in the Philippines. It was their hospitality and how they truly show empathy towards others that caught my attention.
I remember a particular as I was heading back to my hotel in the pouring rain. As I was running back to the hotel, an old man with an umbrella stopped me and asked me, “Sir, Do you need an umbrella?” I was quite shocked as I had no clue who this person was. I could just somehow sense that he was genuinely wanting to help me and did not do it out of any ill-intention. This was just one example out of many incidents that drove me to derive the conclusion that the people of the Philippines are truly friendly by nature.
I continued my journey by joining with the ABINET (ASEAN Business Network) group to setup our booths for the ‘Science for the People’ exhibition. I was surprised to learn that ‘Science for the People’ is an annual exhibition in the Philippines that strongly encourages Filipinos to embrace science and technology in their country to use it to improve their economy and resolve social issues.
Embracing The SDGs Starts From You & Me
I have never attended an exhibition that focuses so strongly on the SDG (Sustainable Development Goals). It was a surprise for me to learn so much about how the people in the Philippines truly care for the world and how they can do more to help in challenging social areas.
During the exhibition, I came across this huge sign board that was promoting to help our Mother Earth by doing various tasks. I found it interesting as the board was promoting and encouraging youths and everyone to be aware of those social issues and how we can help to save Mother Earth through simple actions.
From conserving water, saving electricity, and food wastage are just some of the very basic human issues that we are present in our society. It was eye opening for me as people would walk by and place their signature as a form of pledge to the board.
Personally, my thoughts on such awareness do help to educate the minds of others. It is when our society tries their very best to educate its people. We would than see tremendous improvement on how we think, act, and probably behave in our actions for our world.
As I set up my booth, the people from the ABINET group would come over to help me out. They gave me ideas to ensure that my booth would not look messy and how we could align all of our banners to ensure the flow of participants would get a chance to speak with us and learn more about what we do. Everyone helped one another to achieve one single objective. The objective was just to ensure the participants would have a great time with us and hopefully a partnership could be struck at the end of the day.
I was truly touched as the people who are now my great friends from all over ASEAN do genuinely want to help with one others without any judgement or returns. It was just simply basic human empathy towards others that taught me so much about caring and learning to have a great fun time and yet not being overly judgmental in everything we speak or act.
After spending over a few hours of being at the booth, I decided to take a tour around the exhibition and found interesting grown plants that were made in the Philippines. Given this observation, I found that one of the most attractive things about the Philippines is the abundance of land and rich agriculture.
You do not get to see agriculture often in Singapore, or even in Malaysia. However, in the Philippines, there seems to be a huge focus on agriculture and technology and how transformation of agriculture with technology can help to improve its irrigation or method of farming even more effectively.
This was an interesting observation as there are so much more opportunities to connect these farmlands to the external countries who needed supplies of Philippines goods.
As I walked up to the ABINET meeting room, I had the opportunity to learn from some Japanese crowdfunding experts that shared about the opportunity on the market size of Japan investment and how we could see the growing trend of where people would put their money. It is surprising to see that Japanese people do lots of investment activities in lending and equity.
I also toured the area with one of my Thai friends who runs Dexii, a VR edutainment company for kids. She shared with me about the Thailand landscape and its huge VR market — and that kids really do love to learn from a virtual environment. She hopes to also inspire Filipinos about VR technology.
Collaboration Is The Key
I also saw a huge brochure (see picture above) that explained about safety methods during an earthquake or when a disaster strikes. It was intriguing as I have never seen such a level of detail on the various steps of things to do when an earthquake happens. I am fortunate that I do not encounter such incidents in Singapore, but in the Philippines, non-profits, Government agencies, and corporates do come together to find solutions to defend themselves from such incidents.
The next day, I took the chance to tour around Manila. My first destination was to visit Greenbelt Mall. The mall was known to be the most popular mall within the central business district.
I would compare the mall to Suntec City as each section of Greenbelt Mall were separated to various parts, just like how Suntec City is separated to various towers.
One thing that struck me: I was visiting the garden in the middle of the mall and I saw a chapel out of nowhere. I was later told by my Filipino friend that chapels are built in most major malls to help the people in the Philippines complete all their errands such as buying grocery, washing clothes, and other tasks, in a close proximity after their prayers.
So my second destination was to the famous Intramuros. It is the wall that was built many years ago by the Spanish during colony times. I took a guided tour on a bicycle. The tour guide brought me around the walls and told me about the history of the place and shared that Spain had colonised Philippines for more than 300 years. During that time, the majority of the people in the Philippines were Muslims but were converted to Christ and that is how today majority of the Filipinos were Christ Worshipers.
During my trip at Intramuros, I was caught in the heavy rain with raging winds as I was traveling to the various historical sites. It was the first time I had experienced a very weak version of a typhoon. I was visiting Manila during the monsoon season and therefore experienced such typhoon-like weather.
It was such a memorable experience as I was holding my umbrella moving towards the shelter and got it flown up. The wind was extremely strong! Now that is just considering a very weak version of a Typhoon. What would happen in a real Typhoon then?
The ‘P’ in Philippines Is For Passionate
So to end of my long day touring around Manila, I was happy to be invited by my Filipino friends to have some pizza, drinks, and a sharing session about ourselves.
During our conversations, I gleaned insights about the politics and social issues in the Philippines as they shared with me about the policies that their Philippines president had implemented. In fact, one of them had their family members experience the drug policies. Police would rush in to the various houses and deliver a strong stern warning to stop taking drugs, or be forced to be in rehab.
Although I do not have much opinion on such issues, but what is interesting is that my Filipino friends are just so passionate in their beliefs of what is right or wrong for their country such that they would debate constantly to find the best solution for their country.
It was these passionate conversations that shows how Filipinos place great pride for their country and that there is so much more to learn from them.
Bringing bantu Workspace to New Places 🇵🇭
I was fortunate to have met two non-profits after sending them a cold-email just about 1.5 weeks before I traveled to Manila. It was an eye opener to me as I learned so much from these two very experienced executives of their respective non-profits.
Both of them champion for helping kids and empowering those who are in need in the Philippines. As I introduce them bantu Workspace, it was amazing to learn the similarity of the problems they face in managing people and their communities compared to other non-profits in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia.
I am glad that they have shared about how they could use bantu Workspace for their programmes and activities. I hope it will help them engage and manage their communities more effectively!
In a nutshell: I Was Fully Immersed in SDGs
So to end my journey to the Philippines this time, I am really happy to have met both executives who had 7 years and 16 years of experience to have shared about their social work and the challenges that they have faced to help remove the social problems in the Philippines. I have learnt so much from the Science for the people exhibition about the technologies to achieve the SDG goals, and lastly to have met all my ASEAN friends from Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Laos, Vietnam, and many others!
It is not an easy task to overcome any issues, but again it is our mind and will power that will bring us forward!
