Category: Training Center

Goducate Training Center (GTC) in Iloilo, Philippines, is ready for its first intake of trainees. So far over 30 trainees have been interviewed and accepted for full-time training. Several more are presently undergoing their interviews to assess their suitability to be community development workers (CDWs) in poor Asian communities.

The trainees will undergo training in agriculture and other livelihood skills, teaching English, communication, and a host of other topics for the next 8 months. Much of their training will be “hands-on” training. For example, besides attending lectures on basic agriculture, they will have their own patch of land on which they will plant their a crop. The food that the students produce will be the food what they will be eating. In this way, they will first learn to help themselves before they go out to needy communities to help Asians help themselves.

Similarly, their ability to speak and teach English will be learned not only in the classroom but more importantly in their daily conversations with the other trainees. Trainees are allowed to use their own languages/dialects only in their dormitories. All lectures and discussions will be conducted in English and those who use their languages/dialects will be fined.

A good part of their training will involve actual community work with the neighboring communities, so that our graduates will be familiar with real-life community work. They will teach English to children in the neighboring schools. They will also teach home-based livelihood skills to ladies in the neighboring communities and agriculture to farmers the surrounding farms.

Most of the trainees are Filipinos, but trainees from China, Indonesia, and Cambodia are also included in our 2012 intake.

GTC hopes to produce CDWs who are passionate, committed and competent to help needy Asian communities to help themselves.

GTC hopes to be Asia’s best center for training CDWs.

Goducate Training Center (GTC) in Iloilo, Philippines, trains community development workers (CDWs) for Asia. Since most needy Asian communities are rural agricultural communities, a large part of GTC is devoted to  agriculture. Several new farming technologies are tested in GTC. Such testing provides the trainees with hands-on farming experience and develops in them the spirit of creativity and inquiry. One of the new farming methods in GTC is integrated rice-fish cultivation.

GTC’s rice-fields have consistently produced organic, high-yielding, high-quality rice three times per year. This rice should be sufficient to feed over 100 full-time trainees and staff throughout the year. Late last year, 2 plots of rice were “re-engineered” to cultivate both rice and fish. Instead of growing rice on the entire plot, the rim of  the plot was dug out for fish cultivation. Tilapia and cat-fish fingerlings were put into the water.

The fish eat the insects that gather at the base of the rice stalks and the droppings of the fish fertilize the rice. This is important because GTC rice is produced without the use of insecticides and pesticides. The sale-price of fish is several times higher than that of rice and therefore raises the productivity of the plot.

This month we harvested the fish from one of the plots of rice. The harvest of tilapias and catfish were only 80 g (below the 100-plus kg that we had expected), and the size of many of the fish were below marketable size.

Obviously, there is much fine-tuning to do before we can confidently promote this form of farming to needy farmers to help them help themselves.

 

Goducate’s country leaders and project leaders from the different countries that we serve in stayed on after the official opening of the Goducate Training Center on Feb 11 for a three-day Goducate “summit”, to tell each other about their work and to plan together for the future. The leaders came from China, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and The Philippines. It was Goducate’s second international meeting, the first having been held in Singapore three years ago.

For most of the participants, it was the first time for them to meet each other face to face. Previously, they had only read about each other’s work—mostly through this website.

On the first day the project leaders told about their projects. On the second day, we hosted 200 guests who are involved in helping communities, to tell them more about our work and about how Goducate Training Center could help train creative community development workers. On the last day, the project leaders shared their “dreams” for 2012.

Some new potential additions to the team also attended the meeting. These are extremely talented men who are keen to start new projects for Goducate.

Our outcome-expectations for this Summit were: bonding of the Goducate team, sharing of experiences, and aligning of our plans for 2012. I believe that we met these expectations.

I believe 2012 will be a breakthrough year for Goducate because many of our projects are now tried and tested and ready for “scaling up”.

We hope to see Goducate helping many more Asians help themselves this year.