Healthy MSMEs mean a healthy economy

Last week, I had the opportunity to catch up with Dr. Ted Herbosa. Dr. Ted was one of our Go Negosyo advisers during the pandemic. He, together with the country’s best doctors, scientists, academics and public health experts, provided the guidance that enabled the Philippines to navigate its way out of the pandemic successfully. The excellent people in our group of experts provided the private sector insights on matters like vaccines, boosters, strategic lockdowns, alert level systems, the safe reopening of the economy and the Philippines’ exit from the pandemic.

He was one of the first to freely offer his expertise to the private sector when we needed most the help of people of his caliber. Today, Dr. Ted is the Secretary of the Department of Health (DOH).

So it was like meeting a fellow veteran of a distant war when Sec. Ted and I sat down for a cup of coffee last week. He told me about his priority programs now at the DOH, and I shared how we’re scaling up our entrepreneurship advocacy. I suppose you could say we still work together as part of the team that supports the First Lady’s LAB for All social and medical services caravan.

It was in this vein that Sec. Ted and I got to the main agenda of our meetup: to see how we can bring together entrepreneurship training and health services in a way that aligns with the President’s initiative of bringing services closer to the people. The President and the First Lady have already started the ball rolling and it is now our task to see to it that our activities go in the same direction.

One thing we can do is to give the attendees at our nationwide Go Negosyo entrepreneurship mentoring events access to basic medical assistance, such as free consultations. The people who attend our events – especially the nanay entrepreneurs and the marginalized – can benefit most from having these services readily accessible to them. We have to keep our entrepreneurs healthy so they can keep running their businesses. Healthy MSMEs, after all, mean a healthy economy.

Having the DOH at our events at Go Negosyo will enhance the government services we already offer our attendees, such as assistance in business registration and acquiring the documentary requirements for starting a business. Complemented by the private sector participants we have at our events – such as those offering franchising opportunities or access to funding – we see an example of how much-needed services can be brought closer to where the people are.

Sec. Ted and I also talked about how we can together help impart entrepreneurship skills to small clinic and pharmacy owners because they are, if you think about it, already entrepreneurs and could benefit if we complemented their skills with a few lessons in financial literacy and basic entrepreneurship. We also explored how entrepreneurship training can revive the Botika ng Barangay program, looking at how a revisiting of its mechanisms can finally help it achieve its goal of bringing cheaper medicines to smaller communities.

After meeting with Sec. Ted, I realized it was also in October that Go Negosyo decided to actively respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. In October 2020, with the pandemic unexpectedly shutting down businesses and putting the economy at risk, we started a private sector-led vaccine procurement initiative called A Dose of Hope (ADOH). COVID-19 vaccines did not become available for emergency use until the fourth quarter of 2020, and by the first part of 2021, the whole world was scrambling to get supply. Industrialized countries were, of course, anxious to get things back to normal and got first dibs at the vaccines. The Philippines was nowhere near the front of the queue.

ADOH was a game changer in public-private sector cooperation in that it was able to address regulatory roadblocks that prevented the government from purchasing a non-FDA approved treatment. Under ADOH, the vaccines bought by the private sector from the pharma company would all be donated to the government: half would be for the workers and persons recommended by the donors, and the other half would be used at the government’s discretion. This design spread the risk of vaccine procurement and made it manageable for all parties. The Philippines can now buy vaccines directly, and the private sector shared the risk.

We moved quickly to have it signed by all parties by November 2020 and by January 2021, the Philippines received its first supply of COVID-19 vaccines.

We also learned a lot about the importance of testing as a way to keep essential services running while helping stop the spread of the virus. This meant dramatically increasing testing capacity and making it affordable and scalable, even for small communities and businesses.

Again, private sector stepped in to donate the necessary equipment, training and certification for strategically located molecular laboratories nationwide. More significantly, it contributed to the use of pooled testing as a way to efficiently address problems in speed and cost. Pooled testing – like the ADOH vaccination procurement system – was a game changer. It was an efficient and affordable tool, especially in granular lockdowns.

I look back at our pandemic response efforts because they show how much we can achieve through cooperation. The experts had the knowledge, private sector had the resources and government had the enabling policies and systems to make these plans implementable.

I believe there are more cooperative projects we can explore that align with the administration’s goal of bringing services closer to people. I am encouraged with how well we are working with the Department of Trade and Industry in informing our programs and reaching out to MSMEs in the provinces; the Department of Education in strengthening entrepreneurship training in the youth and the Department of Agrarian Reform in enabling farmers to achieve scale in their operations and become agripreneurs.

It doesn’t surprise me how many people in the private sector are willing to put their shoulders to the task. I’ve seen it several times in the last 20 years that I’ve committed myself to MSME development how good people in government and the private sector can make the impossible happen, and how a commitment to a great purpose can steer us all in the right direction.