After three years working in the Middle East for a Kuwaiti engineering company, Leah Aquino is back in Manila. But rather than relaxing on her visit home, Ms Aquino, a certified accountant, is attending a series of workshops to learn how to set up and manage her own business.
“The seminar was helpful, but I was spending a lot of time helping other participants understand some of the technical terms that the speakers were using,” she said.
Ms Aquino is just one of more than 10,000 overseas workers who have signed up for business training workshops organised by the Philippine government, as they contemplate the dwindling opportunities for working abroad caused by the faltering recovery in the US and Europe and political upheavals in the Middle East and north Africa.
On offer is the chance to borrow between 300,000 pesos ($6,800) and 2m pesos from a government programme that aims to help them start small businesses to augment and eventually replace earnings from working abroad.
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By: Roel Landingin
Source: Financial Times, Oct. 12, 2011
To view the original article, click here.
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