Mindanao Ecolife Cafe

The Mindanao Ecolife Café is organized with the main aim of bringing the power of the web to positively affect the lives of poor and marginalized youth.  The youth are very vulnerable to climate change and are mired in poverty and joblessness and the web has a wealth of solutions for job creation and linking with experts and organizations that can pump-prime their local livelihood initiatives. We will start mainly with youths who have the basic skills and bent to surf the web. Their learning, on a multiplier effect, can then be used to start small, doable local livelihood projects that will benefit themselves and their families.

Internet Café’s abound in schools, urban and rural centers, but these are mainly used for simple emails and gaming. The power of internet café’s is not harnessed to the fullest, when in fact advanced knowledge is there at the tap of the keyboard. No one has thought about this and this is an innovative concept. It has the capacity to equip the poor to search for knowledge in order to adapt to launch new jobs using local resources. Aside from generating knowledge from the web, the user can also interact with the various social networks, with experts from around the world relatively for free. These experts and contacts are a handful in the backwaters of Mindanao, with our best and brightest embarking on their Diaspora in search of a better future in foreign lands. There are so many organizations, network, individuals out there willing to help be it in social forestry, promotion of local livelihoods, green technology, coastal resource management, ecological sanitation, and so on, the list is endless.  Then this will become a South-North dialogue. Tackling climate change should be the concern of everybody because with the ill-impacts of climate change, we sink together with our only planet.  The Mindanao Ecolife Café provides this avenue for mutual dialogue and mutual help.