The Misamis Oriental Akay Fund (MisOr Akay Fund), developed by Resilient.PH collaborators Ace Esmeralda, Jon Biagtan, SJ Gutierrez, Kitt Botero, Tristan Ares, and Wally Panganiban, was named one of only two finalists in the first ever Climate Resilience Challenge of the Oscar M. Lopez Center (OMLC).
Team lead Ace Esmeralda shared, “We take this recognition from the OMLC as a validation of all our hard work in the 18 months of the Executive Master in Disaster Risk and Crisis Management (EMDRCM) Program at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM). We are very excited with the immense possibilities of this project for transforming communities and inspiring positive changes in the way we build disaster resilience as a country.”
Last year, the team of graduate students at the AIM developed a scalable multi-stakeholder community-based disaster risk and sustainability financing project called the “Akay Fund.” It seeks to bring together social impact investors, social development agents, micro, small, medium enterprises (MSMEs) and other community groups to collaborate and set up resources and initiatives that can help every stakeholder become more disaster resilient. Akay Fund also aspires to drive the continuity of social development undertakings amidst the growing threats of climate change and non-climate change-driven disaster risks.
In the course of their academics, the team developed a number of papers grounded on the concept culminating in the development of a concrete feasibility study on implementing the project in the Province of Misamis Oriental henceforth, the project was named the MisOr Akay Fund.
The concept has since been recognized as a finalist in the 2020 AIM Hackathon and more recently, the first ever Climate Resilience Challenge of the OMLC.