Helping people help themselves

When I was working with an NGO, it was our mission to help people help themselves.

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We would scour communities and look for willing individuals who wanted to improve their lives. We started with the marginal fisherfolk, and farmers and our organization groomed them so that they could have better access to high-yielding farming techniques and methods of fishing. We tried to enable peoples’ organizations to gain better incomes through livelihood activities. Empowerment was key.

This could possibly be among the reasons why our economic growth scored well in the indexes last year. We have a growing, thriving population as our economists claim. This exemplifies the cliché that “the youth are the hope of our nation.”

Knowing that we owe a lot of our economic growth to our large population has brought me to ask the question, how can we sustain our economic growth with the trend in our population’s behavior? I have seen a noticeable decline in the number of people who want to raise a family. Our young prefer to enjoy singlehood until they miss out on their biological clock. Only a few want to get married. And for those who do, they cannot find or are not found by a suitable partner.