Abu Dhabi: Filipino community groups have decided to promote a financial literacy programme intensively in the UAE and extend it across the Gulf nations, a top Philippine diplomat said at a conference in the capital on Saturday.
The programme being conducted once a month in Abu Dhabi will also be held in Al Ain and Dubai in the same way, Grace Relucio Princesa, Philippine Ambassador to the UAE, said.
The Filipino community representatives from Saudi Arabia and Oman have committed to promote the programme there, which can be extended to all across the Gulf, she said at the Pinoy Wise International Conference themed “Engaging Overseas Filipinos in Migration and Development Initiatives” organised by the Philippine Embassy and Filipino community organisations in the UAE.
The envoy asked community members to keep their commitments made at the conference as she would follow up everything.
Princesa, who initiated the programme that imparted financial literacy tips to around 2,000 Filipinos in the UAE, said many participants holding five credit cards reduced them to one as a result.
Apart from an eco-tourism project using empty houses of overseas Filipinos back home, the conference mooted concrete investment proposals in agriculture businesses being run by local governments and cooperatives in Philippines, an NGO leader told Gulf News. Overseas Filipino groups have expressed their interest in investing in agro-ventures of a major cooperative society that offers a guaranteed six per cent income for non-risky investments and high yield for non-guaranteed risky investments, Estrella “Mai” Dizon-Anonuevo, Executive Director of Atikha Overseas Workers and Communities Initiative, Inc, said. “In those projects their role is just as investors. But the government and cooperatives offer training to start their own projects in goat raising, organic farming and seed growing, etc,” she said.
The purpose is to encourage overseas Filipinos to plan their return home at an early stage of migration. “They have to plan now, even if they want to go back after 10 or 20 years. You cannot establish a business one fine morning with a lot of money. You have to start studying it and finding partners very early,” she said.
