Last week, Go Negosyo’s Facebook page reached the two million followers milestone. With this, Go Negosyo has officially become the number 1 NGO page in the Philippines and was also hailed as the fastest-growing NGO page in the country, according to social media marketing company Socialbakers. This shows that Go Negosyo now has the largest audience among Philippine NGO pages, with more than a hundred thousand gap from the pages that follow it, World Health Organization Philippines with 1,792,578 followers and Philippine Red Cross with 1,228,156 followers. It has also entered the top 100 NGO pages in the world—the only NGO page from the Philippines to attain such a feat. With all these achievements, this milestone shows our organization’s commitment to our vision of alleviating poverty through entrepreneurship and to our dedication to reach every Filipino and help them realize their entrepreneurial dreams.

As we reach this milestone, I want to show my utmost appreciation to our partners for their untiring support. Without all of you, none of this would be possible. More importantly, however, I would like to thank our two million followers for believing in our vision of an enterprising Philippines. We have been doing this for 15 years already and there were no signs of slowing down even with the pandemic. As a matter of fact, in our earnest desire to help entrepreneurs and aspiring ones, we pivoted and saw the opportunity to scale up. Through our programs, we will continue to provide Filipinos access to mentorship, money, and market.

Looking back, the reach and reception for our programs online have been better than expected. During the pandemic, we managed to produce 600 episodes for our Mentor Me Online (MMO), featured 2,000 guests/entrepreneurs, and gave a total of 12 million dagdag-puhunan to more than 1,500 winners. We have also utilized this platform to give around 300 online sellers a free marketing platform for their products. Our Kapatid Mentor Micro Entrepreneurs Program (KMME) and Kapatid Agri Mentor Me Program (KAMMP) also continued online and as of the latest count, KMME has produced 8,823 mentee graduates, with more than 1,400 additional mentees set to graduate this year, and KAMMP programs have benefited more than 1,600 graduate mentees from over 1,200 associations and cooperatives, benefiting more than 130,000 members across the Philippines.

Adding to the celebration of this milestone and as our way of giving back, we will give a total of P2,000,000 pandagdag-puhunan to our go-negosyantes. We have started giving away P5,000 to 10 lucky entrepreneurs last May 10 and will continue to do so daily until July 10. This is part of Go Negosyo’s “Manalo at Mag-Negosyo” program wherein entrepreneurs are encouraged to take a selfie in their place of business. The winners are selected during our MMO, which airs live Mondays to Fridays at 6 pm.

Having two million followers on an online platform entails a huge responsibility. We have a responsibility to our two million followers, so beyond entrepreneurship, we have also actively supported the push for testing and vaccination against COVID-19 under the framework of access, education, and execution—all in the pursuit of immediately addressing this health crisis so we can then focus on reviving the economy. We know that our unemployment rate today is alarming. That is why we have doubled our efforts to address the health issue so we can further open our economy and generate jobs in the process.

For access, through the “A Dose of Hope” program, we have secured access to millions of doses of vaccines with the first batch from AstraZeneca set to arrive this June and the second batch to arrive from July onwards. We have also facilitated and aided in the access for other vaccines such as Moderna, Novavax, and Covaxin. For education, through the recently launched “Let’s GO Bakuna” campaign, we managed to integrate it into our daily MMO and is now facilitating the creation of various materials, seminars, and conferences that will answer questions on vaccines and address vaccine hesitancy. Lastly, for execution, our partnership with Zuellig Pharma Corp, one of the best logistics providers in the Philippines, has given us the assurance that the end-to-end delivery of the vaccines will be smooth and successful.

With all our efforts on both health and the economy, and as our community expands and grows, we will continue to use our Facebook platform and the community that it has created to continuously empower and enable Filipino entrepreneurs, including the aspiring ones. Again, thank you to our two million followers.