MANA: The legacy we choose to leave behind

My father, Jose “Joecon” Concepcion Jr., used to say that ideas only become durable when they are pursued with persistence. He spent decades of his life proving it. NAMFREL remains a byword when it comes to poll vigilance, and one can hardly talk about nationalism and industry without mentioning his rallying cry of “Yes, the Filipino can.”

Joecon also helped plant the seeds of what would eventually become the ASEAN Business Advisory Council (ASEAN-BAC). He believed that a private sector-led regional organization could carry the Philippines further than any single company could on its own. He did not live to see everything that idea became, but he left it to us anyway, the way a father leaves a name, or a set of values, or a debt still worth paying forward. That is “pamana.” It is not a thing you receive and keep. It is a thing you receive and keep giving.

This year, I have been thinking about what my own pamana should be. Of everything ASEAN-BAC could prioritize during our chairship, I chose to make youth entrepreneurship personal to me. After all, I have seen how entrepreneurship has taught my children valuable lessons that are beyond the formal instruction they receive at school. I believe these opportunities should be made available to more young people.

If you look around ASEAN today, one out of every three you see is under 35 years old. That is 213 million young people, a demographic wave that will decide, more than any policy paper or trade agreement, what this region becomes in the next 20 years. And yet they are so rarely the ones actually consulted on the economy they will inherit.

That is the seed from which MANA grew.

MANA stands for Mentoring ASEAN’s Next Advocates. The name echoes “pamana” and it is, quite literally, ASEAN-BAC’s Youth Legacy Project. Programs come and go with every chairship. What I wanted, this time, was something that would outlive mine, the same way my father’s idea of one ASEAN outlived him. This philosophy I try to inject in my various roles in RFM Corp., Go Negosyo, the Private Sector Advisory Council and ASEAN-BAC.

We built MANA around a simple framework, four Ps that, together, function like an ecosystem rather than a checklist.

Partnerships, first: mapping the organizations already doing good work for young entrepreneurs across the region and connecting them, instead of duplicating what exists. We grew this from a single youth partner in 2017 to 13 youth-led and youth-enabling organizations today.

Policy, second: asking young entrepreneurs directly what they actually need, which is how the ASEAN Youth Entrepreneurship Action Agenda came to be: eight recommendations, written in their voice, not ours.

Projects, third: the summits and carnivals where all of this becomes real, where young entrepreneurs actually walk into a room and meet the people who can move them forward.

And Platform, fourth: a digital opportunity directory, built with the International Trade Center, that finally brings together the region’s fragmented conferences, incubation programs, accelerators and funding windows into one place, so the next young agripreneur, or the next young creative, does not have to start from zero the way so many of us once did.

I have watched this take shape under the stewardship of Miguel Lopez, our Senior Adviser for Youth, whom I asked to lead this work because I trusted him to treat it with the same weight I do. His own history with ASEAN-BAC goes back almost a decade, to when he was a young programs officer himself, and it shows in how he has built this as an ecosystem meant to keep working long after many of us have moved on.

Two flagship gatherings anchor MANA’s Projects pillar this year, and I am proud of how deliberately they were designed to speak to two different young entrepreneurs. The ASEAN Youth Entrepreneurship Summit, happening Oct. 12 at the MOA Arena with SM Cares and the Global Peace Foundation, is for the dreamer, the aspiring entrepreneur, free and open and expected to draw around 10,000 of them. The topics there are less about spreadsheets and more about permission: giving a young person the confidence to actually go out there and start a business.

The ASEAN Young Entrepreneurs Carnival, its 11th edition, happens Nov. 6 in Manila with the ASEAN Young Entrepreneurs Council and the Philippine Young Entrepreneurs Association, a smaller, more technical gathering of 300 to 500 builders, aged 25 to 45, who are already running businesses and need to scale. Between the two, I like to think there is a door for a young entrepreneur no matter where they are in their journey.

And the Youth Action Agenda is already proving it is more than a document. Barely two weeks after our roundtable with young entrepreneurs, our very supportive DTI Secretary Cris Roque, through the Small Business Corporation, launched the P1-billion Youth Enterprise Fund – this is collateral-free financing for young Filipinos with the ideas but without the benefit of having the credit history usually required for such loans. That is what I mean when I say meaningful youth participation is not about giving young people a seat at the table. It is about making sure what they say at that table turns into something real.

The ASEAN chairship pen will return to the Philippines roughly in 2037. When it does, I do not want MANA remembered for the size of its crowds. I want it remembered for how far we pushed the implementation of the Action Agenda our youth themselves wrote, the same way I hope, someday, someone remembers what my father started not for its size either, but for how long it lasted.

That is Angat Lahat. No one left behind, not even the ones who have not yet arrived.