On Being an Aboitiz Scholar

She is a 2nd year student at the University of the Philippines Cebu taking up Business Management. She belongs to the first batch of scholars in the foundation’s purposive college scholarship program. This program is open to existing AGFI scholars who have graduated from high school.  It is purposive because the courses open to candidates are those that will meet job requirements of the different Aboitiz companies.  As such, after the scholars graduate from college, their possibility of employment with Aboitiz, although not guaranteed, is high. 

Beryl, a 2006 national champion for feature writing at the National Schools Press Conference in Kalibo, Aklan, is consistently elected as year level representative to the UP Visayas Cebu College Student Council. Early this year, she was a delegate to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s inaugural Young Leaders Summit in Los Angeles, California.

The mind is like a business entity. You invest on it, it grows, and as long as it is managed well, it yields good produce. In the case of investing in the mind, money is not the determined result, unlike business. Instead, it is knowledge—the investment that can yield a fruit called progress.

This, undoubtedly, is the reason why we Filipinos put high value in our education. I often hear my parents say that education is the only possession that can never be stolen from us. Education is a liberating force, that which shuns ignorance to pave way for understanding.

However, with the prevailing colonial, commercialized and repressive educational system, this liberating force is desolately cast to prison. The supposedly free public education provided by government now comes out as an expensive commodity. At present, we are experiencing an across-the-board lack of textbooks, classrooms, facilities, plus the diaspora of teachers.

This situation openly leads to the path of illiteracy. If we, the youth, should be named as the future of the country, it would mean being equipped with quality education and life skills to improve our economic conditions. However, with the dismal situation of the educational system, thousands of high school students seek tertiary education after graduating but are thwarted from stepping on to college because of the high price tag attached on education.

Seeing this condition as integral to the country’s development and determinant of our future, the Aboitiz Group Foundation Inc. (AGFI) chooses to invest in the minds of the new generations by supporting Filipino students in their elementary, high school and college education. This support is concretized by the allocation of half of AGFI’s total budget to various education-related projects such as infrastructure building, equipment donation, skills training programs, and scholarship grants all over the country.

In Lapulapu City’s Science and Technology Education Center (STEC) alone, my former high school, one could see how AGFI has placed prodigious efforts in meeting its corporate social responsibility. On infrastructure, AGFI has generously provided STEC with equipment-complete physics and chemistry laboratories. These buildings have been constructive in the process of scientific learning since these are open not only to STEC students, but also to other public schools within the city.

For scholarship grants, AGFI has supported 5 pioneer STEC scholars in 2002—basing on the top passers of the entrance exam—by providing monthly financial assistance. This further expanded with the batches that followed, where up to 10 scholars are added on the list every year.

The college scholarship program, recently employed in 2004 as an “experimental project” (as how Executive Vice-President Sonny Carpio calls it) has nine scholars at present. And because the “experiment” showed an exemplary result, in the coming years AGFI will continue to give college scholarship grants to five deserving students every academic year.

In the lens of corporate social responsibility, I have seen AGFI’s prominent endeavor in preparing the next generation of Filipinos in leading the country and elevating our standard of living. Not only focusing on their business events for profit maximizing, as what an ordinary person would think of business entities, Aboitiz shows an admirable concern in today’s relevant issues, and an immeasurable trust that the youth, indeed, is capable of leading the country.

Indeed, AGFI has a big heart for education. As one of the many scholars all over the country that AGFI supports, I have always called myself blessed. For five long, fruitful years and still counting, the scholarship has helped me a lot. In matters of finance, this is the time when one less spending for my college education means one additional opportunity for my two sisters to continue with their schooling. And just as how I expect AGFI to feel in seeing the fruits of their investments in the mind, I feel fulfilled too, for it was not only me who benefited from the grant, but also the whole of my family.

To be a scholar does not only mean enjoying benefits. To be a scholar means always striving to excel, giving more of what you are expected to give, sharing your learning to others. Maria Montessori once said, “If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man’s future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual’s total development lags behind?”

The individual’s total development, if it should move forward instead of lagging behind, should mean transforming minds and transforming lives. This will then bear the fruit we have always sought everywhere—the fruit called progress. Be as it may, as more AGFI scholars are produced, more contributions to the society are expected back. We have AGFI to be very grateful for our education, and we have the country to pay our intellectual harvests forward.