FILIPINO BAYANIHAN GOES GLOBAL
Helping Hands: Touching Lives, Creating Change, Caring for the Environment, Promoting the Philippines, published by DFA’s Foreign Service Institute, chronicles projects on cultural protection and promotion, business and gender developments, entrepreneurship, and agriculture, among others
For the past 10 years, the Philippines has been a donor to countries in Asia and Oceania through the Technical Cooperation Council of the Philippines (TCCP) of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA). This support consisted of seminars, trainings and workshops conducted in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Bhutan, Vanuatu and Nauru. Similar activities have also been held in various parts of the Philippines including Laguna, Cebu and Palawan. These were undertaken during the tenure of former TCCP head, Ambassador José María Cariño, who has recently been assigned as the director general of DFA’s Foreign Service Institute (FSI).
Institutions were tapped as partners such as the De La Salle-College of St. Benilde, Eon Group and various religious orders in carrying out in-house developed and internationally implemented projects on cultural protection and promotion, business and gender developments, entrepreneurship and agriculture, among others.
These milestones of global cooperation through the TCCP is documented in the recently released book, Helping Hands: Touching Lives, Creating Change, Caring for the Environment, Promoting the Philippines, published by FSI.
The book is written by FSI’s Publications section led by Evelyn Katigbak and edited by Cariño.
In the book, Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. hailed TCCP for doing “a remarkable and outstanding work of promoting and cultivating soft power diplomacy.”
Locsin said the programs conducted under Cariño’s leadership “have greatly contributed to development efforts of beneficiary countries whilst simultaneously upholding the expertise and leadership of the Philippines with a range of socioeconomic and cultural issues.”
He likewise noted that aside from the enrichment of socio-economic aspects of the countries involved, the TCCP has promoted peaceful and harmonious relationships between nations through its various training programs.
For his part, Cariño said the involvement of the private sector in these programs is vital to TCCP’s success.
“The private sector and the sharing of our expertise gave our projects the gravitas for the Philippines to be known as a serious, reliable, and excellent source of projects and expertise and a dependable partner in international cooperation,” he wrote.
Cariño added that “transparency and love for country are two guiding principles that have made TCCP a trustworthy partner for its collaborators and beneficiaries.”
The book exercised transparency in the budget used in each of the office’s programs as indicated in the pages where these projects were mentioned.
It is also an art book, featuring abstract paintings by Cariño.