Balik-Turo (Teach-Share)/Educational Exchange

In the previous years, the commission has facilitated the continuing professional education program of the Philippine Nursing Association in America (PNNA), providing assistance to professional Filipino nurses working in the United States to come back and share their expertise through short term professional courses, seminars and other learning activities with their alumni schools.

Under the Exchange Visitor Program, a program established by an agreement between the Philippines and the United States to facilitate the training of young Filipinos in the US, applicants are required to return to the country to practise and transfer what they learned. In many cases, J1 Visa applicants under the EVP program opt to take up permanent residence in the US and availed of the No Objection Statement (NOS) track, which requires them to come back to the country and implement a 40-hour training for a class of their fellows, and fund and implement a development project in a place of their choosing.

The Commission also serves as the secretariat for the Inter-Agency Committee on the Philippine Schools Overseas, which supervises some 40 overseas schools using the Philippine basic and secondary education curricula. A number of these schools have already signified their interest in twinning arrangements that will permit the scaling up of their academic human resources and upgrade the teaching skills of their teachers.

All these modalities of strengthening professional and educational capabilities brings the need for a mechanism that facilitates the mobilization of overseas Filipino skills and professionalism towards training and upgrading of capabilities locally to support an over-all improvement of human resources.

The program components are: (1) development of the database of Filipino professional organizations abroad, and their continuing educational exchange programs, (2) facilitating agreements and linkage between overseas Filipino organizations and local counterparts, (3) working with local counterparts to facilitate entry arrangements and other facilitation services, (4) documentation and monitoring of the projects and initiatives undertaken within the ambit of the program.

Implementing mechanism

CFO’s preliminary partner in this program is the PNAA, whose continuing professional education program will be enhances and replicated to cover other professions and other professional organizational partners such as those in the fields of engineering, medicine, financials among others. National agreements with other countries to facilitate the exchange of students similar to that of the EVP will also be promoted, particularly with countries having a significant competitive edge in specific industries.