[Manila, June 2022] When American Center Director Mylyn Garcia wakes up each day in Manila, her mission is clear: to connect Filipinos to American culture and create greater engagement with the United States through English training, educational exchange, and cultural programming.
| Manila’s American Center Director Mylyn Garcia sees a lot of potential for promoting closer ties to the United States through women’s entrepreneurship programming. |
In 2020, the U.S. Embassy in the Philippines’ American Spaces opened a new frontier, promoting women’s empowerment with the Academy for Women Entrepreneurs – or AWE.
“Entrepreneurship is new for us,” says Garcia. “Especially working with small and medium enterprises.” She sees it as an exciting development with a lot of potential. “We are starting to focus more on startup incubation and getting access to seed funding.”
In the Philippines, AWE spans four islands across the archipelago and is implemented through American Corners programming hosted by local universities. Operating in the cities of Cebu, Bacolod, Marawi, and Manila, AWE Philippines reaches women entrepreneurs who struggle to get a foothold in economies severely impacted by climate change and COVID-19.
| U.S. Embassy Manila oversees 15 American Corners in the Philippines who mission, like here in Bacolod, is to connect Filipinos with the United States. [Photo courtesy of Mylyn Garcia] |
“We launched in October 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, which hit the Philippines hard. A lot of people lost their jobs,” explains Garcia, adding that to survive, many women began small businesses with handicrafts, both online and in person, with varying success. “Many women didn’t know what to do, they didn’t have confidence.”
But Garcia says AWE’s three-month course in business taught women the skillsets they need to run a business and gave them the confidence to get it off the ground – which was critical during the 2021 storm season.
“Cebu is considered like a second capital after Manila, and when Typhoon Rai hit in 2021 people really suffered,” says Garcia. “There was no electricity for a month.”
| U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Heather Variava addresses a crowd at Cebu’s American Corners, whose facilities helped women entrepreneurs to pursue AWE training following Typhoon Rai. [Photo courtesy of Mylyn Garcia] |
Super Typhoon Rai was one of the region’s strongest storms on record, and it devastated the Philippines, displacing hundreds of thousands of people.
After the storm, women entrepreneurs came to the University of San Carlos to take advantage of the American Corner’s stable internet. While at the American Corner, they learned about core business skills including strategic planning, marketing, and financial management.
“We visited Cebu three months ago,” says Garcia. “Women there told us that AWE empowers them, it is helping them to recover.”
In the city of Marawi, AWE helps female heads of household on Mindanao, Philippines’ southernmost island, which in recent years has been besieged by increasing violent extremism. AWE helps women create localized economic prosperity and promotes peace and stability, while also creating businesses that directly support community health.
AWE is helping female heads of household in Mindanao promote local prosperity in the face of rising violent extremism. [Photo courtesy of Mylyn Garcia |
“We had a team of AWE alumnae from Marawi join a USAID-sponsored hackathon to promote the needs of internally displaced people, and they won an award,” explains Garcia.
Marawi’s AWE graduates developed an online platform called Unawa, which means “understanding” in the Tagalog language, to help people get free access to mental health practitioners.
“They said their win was due to the AWE training they got,” says Garcia – a remarkable achievement in a country where mental health care is deeply stigmatized.
| These three women entrepreneurs from AWE Marawi said their AWE training equipped them with the tools they needed to develop an online mental health portal. [Photo courtesy of Mylyn Garcia] |
AWE’s use of the online learning platform DreamBuilder, developed by Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management and the Freeport-McMoRan Foundation, allows the American Corners to strengthen program offerings in ways that deepen ties between the Philippines and the United States.
“We love AWE,” she says, “because it is free and open to everyone.” This is critical in a country where, due to high cost, upper education is out of reach for many.
“AWE’s connection to Thunderbird actually increases Filipinos’ interest to join,” says Garcia, adding that local officials have asked the U.S. Embassy to implement AWE in their cities.
Garcia also says AWE is an asset to American Corners programming, because it allows the Corners to engage with audiences they otherwise cannot reach. She tells the story of Kusinata, one alumna’s restaurant in Bacolod, which specifically hires indigenous people from the remote Ata tribe as cooks, servers, and staff.
| Alumnae from AWE Bacolod gather at the Kusinata, a restaurant opened by an AWE alumna which hires only indigenous staff from the Ata community. [Photo courtesy of Mylyn Garcia] |
“Too often these people are forgotten, they live in mountains, many are illiterate,” Garcia explains. “But the restaurant attracts tourists. It provides training that helps the local community explore other opportunities,” which brings Filipinos of all stripes in closer contact with U.S.-government programs.
“We normally can’t target that audience. But thanks to AWE, we are now able to reach them.”
The U.S. Department of State launched the Academy for Women Entrepreneurs in 2019 to empower women with the knowledge, networks and access they need to launch or scale a business. To date, AWE has trained more than 16,000 women entrepreneurs in 80 countries, including more than 300 women in the Philippines.
For more information: https://eca.state.gov/awe
