KOLPING : a triumph of innovation and hard work

When the Kolping Society of the Philippines received some machineries donated by the Kolping International Society in Germany in 1987, the local branch, in its desire to utilize the equipment, organized several unemployed residents in Calabanga to train in handicraft making.

Training was provided by resource persons who were themselves engaged in handicraft making. Soon after, the group was exhibiting their products in local and national trade fairs. But the Kolping venture into handicraft making never really took off. Not even a parallel venture into wood-based products and accessories thrived. The 10-member Kolping handicraft workers did not seem to be rally interested or comfortable with handicraft making as a business.

Anxious for a more productive and suitable venture and skilled in handcrafting wood-based products and accessories, they tried to adapt their know-how to crafting bamboo that grew abundantly on the 11-hectare property owned by the Kolping Society of the Philippines. For some reason, the association members discovered an innate skill and interest in bamboocraft.

The challenge of utilizing bamboo for purposes other than furniture, of creating and executing designs and were both functional and artistic, of developing never before thought of ways of crafting bamboo fired the immigration of the Kolping workers.

The Kolping members' drive and motivation to achieve and create quality products attracted the interest of CCAP. The synchronization and the mutuality of their goals gave birth to a collaboration that saw some CCAP-sponsored product development and design sessions for the Kolping group.

CCAP provides Kolping marketing and promotions assistance and the services of a designer who regularly conduct intensive product development and design sessions with the group's production staff. This has resulted in the development of exquisite designs that use and bring together hitherto unemployed and unexploited styles and material combinations.

The challenge of sustaining this creative and productive partnership keeps both the CCAP and Kolping mutually alert for ideas and design prospects.

For the CCAP and Kolping, traversing together the path to innovation and growth, relevance and success is a unique and fulfilling experience.

he Community Crafts Association of the Philippines (CCAP), is a non-profit, non-government organization. It is into crafts, development marketing and sustainable development.

CCAP eliminates the many layers of middlemen in the marketing system by directly linking with the buyers and the producers. With a strategy it calls development marketing, CCAP advocates for fair trade and endeavors to pay the producers what is due them, in a trading relationship built on partnership.

Its strategy includes building small but viable community-based enterprise that are effectively organized and self-reliant.

At present, CCAP has helped evolved nine producer associations that strive to stand on their own and eventually snowball development within their own communities. While CCAP likewise deals with entrepreneurs and family-based handicraft businesses, it expects wider spread and longer-term benefits from handicraft trading for the organized producer associations.

CCAP recognizes that for crafts to be a means to sustainable development, it should require more than environmental consciousness. It would need an economic paradigm that can share and spread the benefits of development to the greatest number and ease the pressure poverty places on the environment. It should also require an effective social infrastructure to build on.

CCAP's Sustainable Development Concept in Practice: Mauraro Handicraft Producers Association (MAHAPA)

MAHAPA emerged from a trading relationship between CCAP and a small village entrepreneur who acted as the middle person trading decorative items with individual craft workers. She was convinced about the benefits her community could get if she gives up her personal business in favor of a cooperative set-up where all the craft workers become co-owners of a larger-scale handicraft business. A month after the initial orientation meeting and organizing activities spearheaded by community organizers of CCAP, an all-women, 28-member group (each representing a family) was formally organized and registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The members elected nine members to the Board of Directors, who further elected the original village entrepreneur as President. She remains President until now.

A series of capability-building activities were launched to prepare MAHAPA for bigger challenges. Training activities were conducted by CCAP staff. Representatives from NGOs and government line agencies also shared their expertise by giving technical inputs. Inadequacy of raw materials gave rise to to a tie-up between MAHAPA and a local university's College of Agriculture for a joint abaca plantation project. The University was to provide a project site, planting materials, technical know-how and production and post-production technologies. MAHAPA, on the other hand provided the labor.

Recently, MAHAPA has ventured into more functional items (e.g. packaging for cosmetics for the Body Shop) to keep the market. A slack in sales in the previous year served as a motivation to take product development more seriously and not stick to the kind of product that made them known. CCAP provides them and other producer groups intensive product development by hiring professional designers to ensure a stable and expanding market base for their products.

From an initial all-women membership, MAHAPA has become a household-based (but women represented) association where all the family members are engaged in production. Stories of how houses were built, furniture purchased, children being able to go to school abound in the village. Now it is a recognized contributor to community development, providing assistance to community projects from their own common fund. From their earnings, they were also able to build a warehouse and purchase a second-hand transport vehicle. They have also come of age when they participated in a trade fair in Manila through their own initiative where they were introduced to other exporters.

MAHAPA has yet to experience the market expansion and increased sales that an emerging environmentally conscious market promises to bring. In the same manner, they themselves have to be continuously environmentally conscious not only in their livelihood activities but also in their day to day lifestyle. CCAP would like to believe that the seeds of sustainable development have been planted-through a social infrastructure that can advocate and work towards a more equitably shared wealth and a better managed community resource.

CCAP believes that the individual craftsworker can better achieve progress by uniting with his fellow workers and acting collectively to solve their problems, both social and economic.

This task was made possible because the concept of Fair Trade has various adherents from the developed countries. These are alternative groups, some of them UK-based, that work on the basis of fair trade, not aid for developing and underdeveloped countries. These organizations are interested in trading with community enterprises that facilitate equitable distribution of benefits among participants. CCAP depended greatly on the purchase orders from these organizations for the past years.

Aside from the fair traders, there are developmental agencies like VSO that are greatly aware of the prevailing unfair trade mechanism and the precarious position of our country's craft industry and are willing to offer technical assistance.

For intermediary marketing organization like CCAP, the sources of problems are dual:

Now, more progressive-minded organizations alternative organizations recognize the limitations of the "sympathetic market" and are more honest about the changing consumer behavior and realities of the commercial-hearted marketing environment, but still are able to adhere to their goals of fair and sustainable trade for craftsworkers.

Problem of Declining Sales
For the buyers, this is a big burden, but for the producer it is a matter of losing a way of livelihood. To solve this, producers have to be developed more to meet the more stringent demands of the mainstream market. To help the producers in this move, the following are being done:

This led us to the VSO for assistance.
The first opportunity for linkage came when two volunteers, Lisbeth Dorama and Klaus Nyhof came to the CCAP office with a few pieces of beautiful woven fabrics made by a group of weavers from an ethnic tribe, called the Mangyans, in a very remote island province. The Mangyans have very few opportunities to increase cash incomes, and handicraft marketing is one of the very few remaining ways that could reinforce Mangyan culture and at the same time bring their living standards to an acceptable level. They sought our assistance in marketing the products- and at the same time told us about how VSO can work with CCAP.

An initial meeting with Geoff Brown, VSO country representative, was arranged early last year, where we discussed with him our need for a designer from UK who could help us in our product development projects with the producers. We asked him for somebody with a Western perspective on which products will sell.

By April, VSO Philippines sent us a newspaper clipping of their advertisement for the post. I can still clearly remember what it said: "Overseas & Underpaid & And the best job in the world."

On September 6, Kate Knight arrived in the Philippines, and by November, after learning-or trying to learn-Pilipino, started working with us at CCAP.