CITY OF PINES. A foggy city. City of my youth. Summer capital of the Philippines. That is Baguio. And I was surprised to find that it has retained its "villagey" character. I am staying at the Baguio Cooperative and Credit 4-story Building in the heart of the city. Did you know that it is number one among Century cooperatives, meaning the first in the list of coops with 100 million shared capital? Yes the Mountain Province people are a great lot in terms of cooperative undertaking. It lends to members twice or three times the amount the gave as capital based on the length of period they have been in.

Coops are not viable projects for funding agencies because of the high mortality rate, but this one beats them all. It is possible to have a successful cooperative venture. The interest rate is 2% or so per month, cheaper than bank rates.

I think this kind of NGO work is really worth emulating. Imagine, they have a Lingap Fund loan for peddlers and nobody has applied for it. The loans applied for are in the range of hundreds of thousands, which speak a lot about the business acumen of Baguio folks.

How I wish we could replicate this in Manila among the urban poor sectors.