QUEZON City Vice Mayor Joy Belmonte on Sunday cited the high success rate of her livelihood program through the “Tindahan ni Ate Joy.”
She said since its launch in 2012, the program has produced hundreds of successful entrepreneurs with almost 1,000 solo parents now operating their own variety stores.
With a success rate of 85 percent, the livelihood program has achieved its purpose of providing economic empowerment to solo parents, mostly women, who have no one else to depend on in raising their children, she added.
“This is one of my flagship programs, my favorite. Our program’s success rate is now at high 85 percent,” she said.
Under the “Tindahan ni Ate Joy,” a qualified solo parent is granted P10,000 worth of grocery merchandise as a startup business support.
“These are the women who got widowed, separated from their husbands, or were abandoned by their spouses for another,” Belmonte said.
“They were left with the burden of raising their family alone, so we came up with a [livelihood] program to help them stand up,” she added.
Unemployed solo parents, living with school-age children, between 30 and 60 years old, and members of the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. are entitled to the program as the program provides trainings and seminars about entrepreneurship.
She said, however, there have a few unsuccessful, adding “they were unsuccessful because of natural calamities not because of their personal shortcoming.”
Previously, Belmonte on Friday called on barangay chairperson to refrain from recruiting inept watchmen or barangay public safety officers as “political accommodations.”
She said the village watchmen are the communities’ first line of defense and are supposed to be the active partners of law enforcement authorities in crime prevention and emergency response.
“We encourage our punong barangay not to recruit BPSOs just for political accommodations,” she said.
“We all know the Filipino culture—[in] giving political accommodations to those who have helped,” she added.
The shortage in the number of policemen assigned in Quezon City could be offset by the presence of barangay watchmen, who should be physically and mentally fit for the job, she said.
“We have many trained and skilled ones,” she noted.
The Quezon City Police District has about 5,000 policemen protecting the city’s three million residents, according to Belmonte.
“In my view, this is a problem,” she said.
In partnership with national government agencies and the private sector, Belmonte said the city government has never been negligent in improving the welfare of the barangay officials and employees, including the watchmen as far as allowances, training and personal development are concerned.