I am happy to join you today in celebrating the 10th year of service of the Guarantee Fund for Small and Medium Enterprises — a milestone that reflects the fund’s durability and growing maturity.

This anniversary highlights your mission: “to operate a credit guarantee scheme to boost the productivity of our small and medium entrepreneurs”.

I congratulate the Guarantee Fund for Small and Medium Enterprises for performing excellently despite all the difficulties and constraints it has had to confront.

Equally deserving of our commendations and gratitude are its accredited financial institutions, who have stood steadfastly behind the fund over these past 10 years, by their opening up responsive financing facilities in order to stimulate entrepreneurship across the countryside.

The presence here today of the pillars of our financing community is most welcome, for it demonstrates both their faith in our capability of attaining our economic goals embodied in “Philippines 2000!!!” and their commitment as the partners of our “small people” in this quest.

Let me offer my deep appreciation for your valuable contributions. By extending over p2-billion worth of loans to small and medium scale enterprises in agribusiness, manufacturing, and the industrial and service industries, you have made it possible for over a thousand entrepreneurial ventures to be established.

This in turn has generated livelihood and employment opportunities for hundreds of thousands of our countrymen throughout our 15 regions. The creation of opportunities has resulted in supplementing family income and improving the living standards of our lower and middle classes, and more important, in giving them greater hope and confidence in the future.

Indeed, the productive partnership of the GFSME and its accredited financing institutions has brought us closer to achieving our economic goal of self-reliance and sufficiency for our countrymen.

In the many places I have visited since I assumed the presidency, i have seen the diverse faces of poverty. But I have seen as well overwhelming signs of our people’s resilience, their resurgent optimism and many indications of growth.

I strongly feel that we can work towards a more equitable distribution of resources and benefits if only our middle and lower classes had easier access to affordable financing, entrepreneurial training, as well as appropriate technology.

With your sustained and active commitment — all of you in the GFSME and the banking institutions — I am positive that we can achieve much in lifting more of our disadvantaged countrymen from poverty and the hopelessness and indignity that being poor brings about.

We can assist so many of them become productive, confident and self-reliant citizens, proud of being Filipinos. In this way, they can toil and apply their resources and ingenuity in improving their own lot and that of their communities, rather than seek their fortunes and futures in other lands. This is one of the major objectives of our national employment program called “Kabuhayan 2000!!!”.

Eight years ago, Filipino people power became a world symbol of peace and unity that transformed our beloved Philippines into a functioning democracy. We commemorated our 1986 people power revolution only last week, reliving and reconsecrating ourselves to the EDSA spirit and resolving to unite once more to achieve our shared vision of a better Philippines.

We fervently believe that with each passing year we can advance to faster and sustained growth by empowering the common tao in his livelihood and in his social concerns, thus enabling him to participate positively in the process of community development and nation building. Ordinary Filipinos continue to be the most effective agents of change and the ultimate beneficiaries of socio-economic reform.

I am confident that the guarantee fund for small and medium enterprises, together with its accredited financial institutions, will continue to play a significant role in helping achieve our sustained development towards a prosperous future for the Philippines.

Mabuhay ang Pilipinas!