TAGBILARAN CITY, June 11 (PIA)--The Department of Trade and Industry's (DTI) push to guide small cottage industries mark improvements in productivity and competitiveness brings them to Cabilao Island, in Loon town, to help prop up the Bayong Development Program (BDP) with game-changing facilities.
In a cottage industry that allows the women alternative incomes, keeping meager money flowing year round is almost an impossibility. We can't dry stripped romblon during rainy days, shares a mother-weaver whose husband fishes when the demand for daily contract carpenters wane.
Romblon, a spiny fibrous palm of the pandan family, which grows abundantly in the island, is the primary material for native women mats.
Once harvested from the palms, weavers strip the palms into thin equal widths, dry them out in the sun, scrimp them and then dip them in dyeing vats with their desired colors, air dry before weaving them.
Then woven into colorful mats, these romblon wovens found a value added to the mats when it is woven into native romblon bags (bawjot) or bayong.
But even with the bayong as developed product and with a marketing assistance from government, incomes still drip during the wet season when drying is restricted to very few dry spaces inside houses.
On this, the DTI launches in Cabilao its big push for the island entrepreneurs its Shared Service Facility (SSF) for BDP with a mechanical drier, cooking stoves and dyeing vats, according to Jerome Gabin of DTI Bohol.
The goal is to advance productivity of small and medium enterprises (SME) and meet demands pegged by the opening Asean integration and the global market, sources at the DTI added.
The step is also in line with DTI's ‘Big Push’, which aims to make microenterprises efficient and help the government achieve the country's development plans and ease poverty thus attain the elusive inclusive growth.
DTI's Big Push focuses on market driven production; convergence and collaboration; and ‘green industry for green economy’.
With the big push, DTI hopes the new SSF in the BDP would improve quality of productivity the cooperating organization: Cabilao Romblon Weavers Network (CROWN).
This is by addressing the gaps in the processing sector value chain by the handling of appropriate manufacturing-enhancement equipment and technologies for the common use of the MSME in the same cluster sector, according to Maria Elena Arbon, DTI Bohol Director.
The SSF would be used by the island's bayong weavers network and small scale households into romblon weaving, DTI assured.
The DTI, along with key Bohol officials are coming to Cabilao on June 24, where the launching of the SSF for BDP happens at 11:00 AM. (rac/PIA-7/Bohol)
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