A nation of entrepreneurs

NO HOLDS BARRED
Ike Señeres

MANILA -- It is difficult to establish as connection between corruption and poverty and perhaps it is easier to establish a connection between poverty and prosperity. Having said that I would venture to say that with lesser poverty in this country, there would perhaps be lesser corruption. More so now that the evil of corruption has penetrated into the private sector, and is no longer the solo domain of the public sector.

In a nation where spiraling costs of living is the norm amidst more or less flat incomes, there is no other way for our people to earn more incomes other than entrepreneurship, removing the option of corruption because after all, we have to assume that given the opportunity, the majority of our people would opt for an honest means of income.

It is a sad reality that in a nation with vast natural and human resources, we are awash with poverty, even if we are surrounded by many opportunities to create more value added and to increase our national productivity. Of course, we have many big companies foreign and local that are producing and creating new value added, but for the most part, there are not enough small companies that are doing so.

I received a good suggestion from a computer expert that if we could really solicit old computers from abroad for distribution to needy beneficiaries here, we should include entrepreneurs in our distribution list, and not just the barangay governments and the public centers for delivering basic services. I think that this is a good suggestion, thinking as well that there is always a way to balance our distribution priorities.

Whether we distribute the computers to small business owners or distribute them to public centers where everyone could have access to them, the bottom line issue or opportunity is to enable local villages to connect to the Internet, so that they could expand their markets using electronic commerce, selling either to local or global customers.

I also received another suggestion from the same expert that we should not only think of computers in giving access to small business owners, we should also think of providing more mobile access, reminding me that a cell phone is actually a computer that is in the hands of more people and is therefore more pervasive so to speak.

Come to think of it, we do have the opportunity of creating local networks that are of course computer based, but are accessible as well by mobile phones, using only simple text messages for data entry and query purposes. This does not need hi-tech mobile software, because even the so called Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) sites did not become popular, being too hi-tech for most people perhaps.

Even if our country is known to be the text messaging capital of the world, there are not too many mobile software applications that would cater to the needs of ordinary cell phone users for business support services. In the history of technology use, we have seen that the point of reckoning always is the availability of devices to more users, and that is precisely the advantage of mobile phones nowadays.

On the brighter side, the popularity of mobile phones has caused the more widespread availability of wireless Internet access even in the remote places that have no local Internet Service Providers (ISP). What this means is that even the more distant barangay units could now connect to the Internet, the only problem remaining is the cost of access which could be addressed another way.

Going back to my original topic, we should really find more ways to give more opportunities to more people to become entrepreneurs, giving them as well the tools to succeed in their business, whether these are desktops, laptops of handheld mobile phones.

Much more thinking has to go into the challenge of giving more electronic access to more people. What we know for now is that for as long as we give them the tools, they will find their own ways to succeed in what they will do. Meanwhile, what is important is to gather the enablers in the local places who could be of assistance to the prospective users of the refurbished computers that will be distributed to the barangay units.

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