Excepts from Josell Valenton’s speech during the 2022 MCPI Annual Conference held at the Sheraton Park Hotel, Manila Philippines, August 25, 2022 :
“We continue to face the challenges of operating in a world in chaos, a world in constant turmoil.
We all saw how the most recent and still ongoing health crisis has brought the world to its knees with 600 million sick, over 6 million deaths, a quarter of businesses shuttered, about $80 billion in monetary losses and over a hundred million people losing jobs.
In the Philippines, economic losses are estimated to between P276 billion to P2.6 trillion due mainly to the decline in household consumption as a result of drastic contraction in commercial activities, business closures and job losses.
Earlier, Assistant Secretary Cancio shared that the Philippine economy is recovering and projected to sustain its growth. While this is much needed good news, we encourage enterprises to approach the new world with caution as crisis in cyclical.
History has time and again showed us that economies growing, and crashing is a repeating phenomenon. Slumps and recessions are caused by industry crashes, surge in oil prices, political events, climate, and natural disasters. Right now, the world has not even exited the pandemic and already it is hit again by the effects of the war in Ukraine.
With these in perspective, a question business leaders ask is can enterprises be shock proofed? Or at least be made more resilient to cyclical crises?
At Power 4 All, we’d like to offer an idea that could cover some missing links
Earlier, I mentioned that the huge economic losses in the country during the pandemic was caused by a steep decline in household consumption or consumer spending.
Let’s examine what drives consumer spending. If you are familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs,
the empirical human needs are the physiological and safety needs. These are very basic needs like food, water, safety, health, livelihood…
We see a very strong link between the address of these basic needs to the sustainable success of enterprise. Let me explain…
A person’s well-being allows him to gain capacity in the form of livelihood and income. Income drives spending and spending enriches a person’s experience and quality of life. This improves on well-being that allows a further increase in capacity and subsequently and increase in spending.
Therefore, creating situations where consumers are able to access food, water, power, education in a sustained and uninterrupted way enables a resilient enterprise.
The sustained fulfillment of these basic needs are the Building Blocks not only to personal well-being but enterprise well-being.
Ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to introduce you to Power 4 All’s Building Blox solutions.
These solutions are modular and inventive technologies that create access to basic needs to any place under any condition. They are autonomous, independent, self-powered and easy to operate micro service stations are designed to bridge the gaps in conventional approaches to providing basic services.
Imagine, addressing food security by modular tech solutions like farm irrigation and cold storage access for farmers and fishermen to preserve perishable goods.
Imagine fully equipped health clinics that can be deployed at the barangay levels across the country.
What if power can be supplied where transmission lines don’t exist.
What if clean water can be supplied where conventional infrastructure is not available.
Imagine more modern IT-based school labs delivered to off the grid communities.
Where there is demand there is enterprise opportunity. The demand for these basic services are constant - and the demand actually increases, not decreases, during crisis.
So in the next pandemic, earthquake, war or climate crisis, enterprises linked to these basic service activities should not only survive but thrive.
Therefore, the idea we’d like to interest the council in is can you create opportunities to put these Building Blox in places where they are needed within your respective areas?
So in the next pandemic, earthquake, war or climate crisis, enterprises linked to these basic service activities should not only survive but thrive.
Therefore, the idea we’d like to interest the council in is can you create opportunities to put these Building Blox in places where they are needed within your respective areas?
The businesses models are quite open and creative and can include providing entrepreneurs financing to run these service-based business, encouraging government and service oriented organizations to investigate this or even running these service-based businesses yourselves.
We believe these are the building blocks towards a more resilient future 4 all.”