Philippine Business Magazine: Volume 9 No. 3 - Corporate Citizenship
Last Should Be First
In helping public schools gain competitive advantage, HSBC believes that the last should be first
By Maureen Macaraig-Martinez

Well-performing public schools usually get a bigger bulk of private sector assistance for the improvement of their facilities and infrastructure. Most donors, wanting to ascertain the efficient use of their donation, believe that assisting above-average schools would yield higher success rates.

Reading buddies. An HSBC employee sets an example for students in the higher grade levels to have reading sessions with the younger kids

The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) in the Philippines would like to think differently. It prefers to level the playing field for disadvantaged schools by selecting among them one school to be their pioneering Model of Excellence (MOE) School – the Esteban Abada Elementary School, in Quezon City. “Building Better Schools for Brighter Futures” was the slogan HSBC used in this project with Books for the Barrios-USA (BftB-USA) as its main partner. BftB-USA, an American NGO, is active in sending second-hand books from schools and libraries in the United States to far-flung barrios in the Philippines. They are also the proponents of the Model of Excellence (MOE) School Program.

The Esteban Abada Elementary School is BftB-USA’s 35th MOE school, but it is the first to be funded by a private organization. In the previous MOE schools, the community and the school use whatever resources they can get from the local government unit to upgrade school equipment and amenities. With HSBC putting in P5 million for the project, they were, for the first time, able to implement an ideal MOE scenario.

Highest of the Lows
Laine Santana, HSBC Assistant Vice President for Public Affairs, says Esteban Abada Elementary School was chosen as the grant’s first recipient because it had the strongest potential among the lower performing schools in Quezon City. The school had a big land area and spare rooms that HSBC could convert into a library and a computer room. It also benefited from a supportive and responsive Department of Education representative to make the intervention more effective.

The makeover of the Esteban Abada Elementary School started in August 2000. It was tedious, Santana narrates, since the rooms had to be renovated before the HSBC employee volunteers were able to install the equipment and beautify the rooms that were to be their libraries. “The elementary library we did was not just any other library. We invested in making it very colorful and a very fun place to be in so that it can be conducive to reading. For the computer laboratory, we raised the flooring, following the standards of HSBC.” The bank furnished the computer room with 29 brand new PCs with internet access.

With the pre-school component being an important part of the MOE School Program, HSBC did a lot of innovations, too. It added a toy library with manipulative games and puzzles — a place where parents can play with their children. HSBC believes that while pre-school is not part of basic education, it facilitates a child’s adjustment to the elementary level.

The school was also repainted and it was in this activity that the community effort became evident evident. HSBC donated the paint, but the parents and teachers painted the walls and the perimeter fence, did the gardening and cleaned the school. With the school looking good, the whole community also felt good. Their sense of ownership of the school became stronger than ever.

Unlike the others, this library donated by HSBC at the Esteban Abada Elementary School is very colorful to entice students to hang out and read

Morale Booster
Esteban Abada Elementary School never had this much attention from the private sector. When they were faced with an offer to do improvements in the school for the first time, the faculty was skeptical, almost sure that it wouldn’t work. But Santana says that when they saw the physical changes, the attitudinal changes started to show. “The teachers now are more encouraged to teach and are motivated to interact with the students because they have the resources. They don’t have to get that out of their pockets anymore because some of the materials that we donated were also school supplies like papers and crayons.” The intervention that HSBC did on the school helped a lot in inspiring the teachers to be creative in their teaching methods. They put into practice what Nancy Harrington, founder of BftB-USA, told them – that one is limited only by his imagination.

Almost a year after the July 2001 launching of the newly-improved Esteban Abada Elementary School, it has gained the confidence it needs to improve the quality not just of its students, but of its teachers as well. All this because HSBC took a chance in making a difference from below instead of from the top. For HSBC, the Esteban Abada Elementary School is just the beginning. It is now looking at more schools to help. More than the aesthetic and infrastructure development that the public will see from HSBC’s initiatives, there lies a more important transformation that happens in the community it serves – teachers that are more motivated, parents with renewed hope, and students who are more driven to succeed – all the ingredients needed to have “better schools with brighter futures.”