DTI 11 to conduct 10 Mentor Me runs this year

DEPARTMENT of Trade and Industry (DTI) Davao Region targets 10 Mentor Me program runs for 2017 under the Kapatid Angat Lahat Program.

According to Rachel Remitio, Chief for Small Medium Enterprise (SME) Development Services Division of DTI, after their pilot launching on October of last year, which produced more than 20 graduates, they are now targeting more than 250 graduates for the year in the entire region.

Remitio shared there were even graduates during last year’s batch who belong to indigenous groups and persons with disabilities.

“Mentor Me program runs for 12 weeks, 10 weeks of which tackles 10 different modules. It’s like you studied Master of Business in Administration (MBA). The modules are the subjects taken up when you enroll to an MBA course like production management, operations management, marketing, human resources, obligations and contract, supply and value chain, taxation, and accounting for non-accountant among others,” said Remitio.

She also said they choose the interested participants who are micro enterprisers who had been registered and been operating at least a year and has a capitalization of not more than P3 million. She said the full commitment of the participant to complete the 12 weeks period of the mentorship program is also very im-

She said the full commitment of the participant to complete the 12 weeks period of the mentorship program is also very important.

For 2017, a P4 million budget was allotted for the 10 Mentor Me program runs. Two runs will be done for Davao City, Davao del Sur, Davao del Norte, and Davao Oriental while Compostela Valley and Davao Occidental will each have one mentorship run for the year. These sessions had started early this year and are already on going.

Remitio said the participating industries are mostly coming from the food processing, housewares and souvenir items, and retailers like hardware stores.

“The objective of this program is for the micro entrepreneurs to scale up their operations. We conduct monitoring like after 6 months to 1 year, we check how their businesses are doing, whether they have scaled up. This will serve as information for decision makers to see whether we should continue with the program. Through this monitoring, we will also check whether the owners of these scaled up businesses can be hired already as mentors for the modules,” Remitio said.

She also said with their monitoring of the previous batch, they have discovered that a number of the graduatebusinesses had already scaled up and even even have export demands already.