Cebu City Hall, UP seal partnership in South Road Properties
By Jully Venus Cuizon, Correspondent
A well-paying job in a call center and a chance to earn a master's degree in the same work site is a “strategy” that may pay off for Cebu City and the University of the Philippines.
If this attracts the “brightest workers” in the region, business is sure to follow.
Five hectares of reclaimed land in the South Road Properties (SRP) were donated to the state university, which will build a graduate school within the next three years.
As a condition, UP Visayas Cebu Campus will offer a master's degree in business administration (MBA) evening program and continuing education in the English language.
UP President Dr. Emerlinda R. Roman and Cebu City Mayor Tomas R. Osmena signed the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) on the donation of 51,372 square meters of land yesterday.
“We are firmly establishing our right and competitiveness of Cebu in the future,” said Osmeña during the signing ceremony at the Social Hall of the Cebu City Legislative Building.
“I would like to see the day when Cebu will be producing 3,000 MBA graduates a year and all employees of call centers. These services will be offered to regional headquarters in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and other parts of Southeast Asia whose workers will come to Cebu for their master's degrees.”
Roman said UP would move quickly to build the school and will likely offer the MBA program this June, starting with classes in the existing UP Cebu campus in Lahug.
She said she and other UP officials were impressed with the mayor's dream “to make Cebu the first city of choice in the country and not just an alternative to Manila” and that UP has a role here in human resources development.
Before the signing, Mayor Osmeña sat down with the UP officials and suggested ways to partner with the private sector to get the facilities and programs up and running.
Present in the signing were Councilor Hilario Davide III and other city councilors, UPVCC Dean Enrique Avila, members of the Board of Regents, visiting UP officials from Diliman, businessman Manuel Go, SRP Marketing Director Joel Mari Yu.
Another condition of the deed of donation is that UP shall consider the project as its flagship Centennial project to offer programs in the fields of computational science product design and packaging, communications design, management, sciences, mathematics and the arts and humanities for the Visayas and ASEAN regions.
UP shall not convey in whole or in part the property to any third party. The deed of donation was approved by the City Council on March 4, 2009.
In his speech, Mayor Osmena said the partnership is a bold step for Cebu City and UP to make Cebu more “competitive” in a globalized economy and improve the workforce in Cebu and was an initiative being taken “without waiting for the central government” to act.
The mayor said he would like to see “educational courses geared to the lifestyle” of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) workers. For example, an employee who gets off a graveyard shift could just go downstairs from his office to attend an MBA class because the schedule fits his reporting time.
He said BPOs abroad would favor having their employees get an affordable MBA degree in Cebu where workers have good people skills and a desire “for a better life.”
“The city government is not using SRP simply as a business of real estate. We want to do something extra with it and as I promised, we are looking for ways and means to help develop the economy of Cebu.”