Mindanao Ecolife Hub: Mindanao Community Learning Space for Climate Change Adaptation
The Mindanao Ecolife Hub is organized with the main aim of bringing the power of the web to positively affect the lives of the poor. The poor are very vulnerable to climate change and the web has a wealth of solutions for climate change adaptation which they can harness to their own end. We will start mainly with the young, students and non-students alike who have the basic skills and bent to surf the web. Their learning, on a multiplier effect, can then be transferred to their parents and they can start small, doable climate change adaptation modules at home, from the learning they get in the internet.
Internet Café’s abound in schools, urban and rural centers, but these are mainly used for simple emails and gaming. The power of internet café’s is not harnessed to the fullest, when in fact advanced knowledge is there at the tap of the keyboard. No one has thought about this and this is an innovative concept. It has the capacity to equip the poor to search for knowledge in order to adapt to climate change. Aside from generating knowledge from the web, the user can also interact with the various social networks, with experts from around the world relatively for free. These experts and contacts are a handful in the backwaters of Mindanao, with our best and brightest embarking on their Diaspora in search of a better future in foreign lands. There are so many organizations, network, individuals out there willing to help be it in social forestry, promotion of local livelihoods, green technology, coastal resource management, ecological sanitation, and so on, the list is endless. Then this will become a South-North dialogue. Tackling climate change should be the concern of everybody because with the ill-impacts of climate change, we sink together with our only planet. The Mindanao Ecolife Hub provides this avenue for mutual dialogue and mutual help.
The Mindanao Ecolife Hub will bring this idea to reality either by partnering with local internet cafes’ or setting small Ecolife Hub able to serve a geographic area. We will pilot first the concept in Initao, Misamis Oriental then expand to the province of Lanao del Norte and Zamboanga del Norte. While the Hub needs start-up funding, eg. purchase of computers and other equipments, it is intended to be a job generation and self-financing enterprise and to be owned and operated by the local youth organization in the area. Self-financing can come from allied economic activities that can be done in the Hub, some of these are; basic internet services for walk-ins, internet and computer tutorials, photocopying and typing jobs, sales of local food products and providing tour guides mainly for local tourists. Local tourism will be integrated to the climate-change adaptation activities of Ecolife Hub beneficiaries. Why local tourism? This is because people living in poblacion and urban centers, especially the youth have no more idea about culture and mores in the rural areas, they being more attuned to malls and life in the city.
Aside from the ICT- based facility the services of the Ecolife Hub will include the following;
a. Rural and urban eco-tourism center.
b. Community-based climate change adaptation center.
c. Climate-change library hub.
d. Local livelihood and local products promotion center.
