Creative industry launches reboot toolkits for MSMEs

CEBU, Philippines — The Cebu creative industry launched a mechanism aimed at helping stakeholders to cope with the devastating effects of the pandemic to their businesses.

Gil Zaire “Butch” Carungay, Philippine national consultant for United Nations (UN) Department of Economic and Social Affairs, announced the introduction of Creative Business Reboot Toolkits (BRT).

BRT was launched online to help Cebu- based MSMEs in the numerous disciplines that comprise the local creative ecosystem to revive their businesses as the world continues to grapple with the devastating effects of the COVID19 pandemic.

This will provide Cebu-based (micro, small and medium entrepreneurs) a new enabling mechanism that utilizes a simplified approach to critical thinking frameworks “to help them cope, recover and flourish in the age of COVID19.”

The BRT aims to incent onboarding by making otherwise complex strategic concepts easier to digest, implement and deploy.

It also hopes to dispel the false notion that creativity and business sensibility cannot co-exist when in fact, they have to.

Carungay, who is also a creative entrepreneur, design advocate and community crusader, said pandemic or not, creative entrepreneurs need to realize the importance of activating both sides of their brain should they wish to survive, much less thrive, in this overly complex, hypercompetitive world “we all live in.”   

This initiative is a key milestone in a project that was originally meant to facilitate the implementation of Cebu’s creative agenda.

However, as the lockdowns were implemented as the project was just commencing in March 2020, it was immediately amended to refocus on COVID19 response.

The BRT is a direct result of months of research, focus group discussions, two major surveys and countless consultative sessions with industry stakeholders and experts from the local, national and international levels.

This project is sponsored by the Sustainable Development Goals Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) in cooperation with the Department of Trade and Industry of the Republic of the Philippines and the Cebu UNESCO City of Design.

The latest figures released by the Philippine Statistics Authority further reinforces the extremely dire situation for those engaged in this sector – registering the steepest year on year declines vis-a`-vis any other sector.