Model for Poverty Reduction and Market Empowerment for Small Scale Fishers in the Philippines

Poverty reduction and market empowerment for Filipino small scale fishers is possible. This can be achieved through the parallel thrusts of community-based coastal resource management and social enterprise development, apart from ensuring that small scale fishers have access to adequate capital and appropriate infrastructure. Needless to say, we need to maintain a viable and sustainable fisheries industry through the promotion of market tools and incentives to ensure the judicious utilization of common-pool resources. Specifically, adoption of responsible practices in the aquaculture sector, in both inland and marine areas, is also expected. All these, of course, should come to bear fruit in a regime where institutionalized fishery management structures are fully integrated. 

Moreover, some form of social protection and insurance need to be extended. Tambuyog is working on labor market interventions that aims to promote employment and protection of workers in the fishing industry social insurance schemes to manage risks associated with unemployment, ill health, disability, work-related injury and old age for small scale fishers and development of fisher folk settlement initiatives that deal with the key issue of tenure over their settlement areas while also addressing the vulnerability of small scale fisher communities to natural disasters and the expected negative impacts of climate change.

Tambuyog is steadfastly pushing for the establishment of community based social enterprises owned, operated and/or managed by the fishers themselves and their partners not only to increase household incomes but more importantly to strengthen the position of fishers in their right to fishing areas. We are also guaranteeing the enhanced participation and promotion of entitlements of women a vital part of sustainable fisheries by addressing their gender needs and interests, including reproductive health concerns and domestic violence. 

To advance all these objectives and key result areas, it goes without saying that Tambuyog Development Center shall strive to become a robust, financially stable organization with reliable networks that have strong capacity to influence public and private sectors not only in the Philippines but in East and South East Asia as a whole.