Made possible through the partnership of ECLOF PHILIPPINES (“ECLOF”) and BAYAN ACADEMY (“Bayan”), the proposed Entrep 101 training aims to equip ECLOF Philippines officers and staff with entrepreneurial knowledge, skills, and tools to deepen their understanding on ECLOF’s business, and to further enhance their competencies on how to effectively market the loan products and services of ECLOF. Currently, the loan products of ECLOF are the following:

1. Agri Microfinance - This product portfolio provides financing facilities for those engaged in agriculture to ensure food availability and livelihood for clients whether they are enterprising, laboring, or ultra-poor members of the community.
    
2. The Micro Negosyo at Serbisyo (MNS) Loan - ECLOF products under this line are basically intended for livelihood endeavors and micro enterprises. The financing is intended to be used for the start-up and scaling up activities of the client entrepreneurs.
    
3. Client Service Loans - These products are meant to address emergency or improvement needs, including hospitalization of any family member, calamity or burial assistance, education (such as tuition fees), house repair / renovation, and even appliance purchases of loyal clients with excellent credit history.
    

ECLOF management has stated that their officers and staff have traditionally been good performers with regard to their Agri Microfinance products. ECLOF, however, is still in search of a way to retool their people such that they can also boost the performance of their MNS Loan. Marketing ECLOF’s MNS Loan requires an entirely new set of competencies mainly because of the very different target market, micro enterprises.

The training’s specific objective is: to address the competency gap so ECLOF officers and staff can effectively push all their product lines, especially the MNS Loan.

The chosen topics for the training are self-mastery and enterprise development as applied to microfinance operations. These topics should help the participants understand the different management areas and the risks related to enterprise development as ECLOF strives to push its MNS Loan. The course will also help the participants assess the entrepreneur and the overall performance of his or her enterprise.