About the Speaker About the Speaker

Ed is the President and Vice Chairperson of the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement. He is also the founder and current president of the Education for Life Foundation (ELF), an NGO that runs a grassroots leadership-formation program. He is a Founding Fellow of the La Liga Policy Institute; Vice-President of the Association for World Education; and Chairperson of the boards of Empowering Civic Participation in Governance, Institute for Popular Democracy, and Asia-Pacific Communication Forum. He works with nongovernment organizations in the fields of democratization and development, emphasizing education and leadership formation, project design, implementation, and evaluation, using participatory methods. Under the Estrada Administration, he served as director general of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA), where he led in the formulation of the National Technical Education and Skills Development Plan toward the three strategic perspectives of global competitiveness, rural development, and social integration; He also led the development of the Community-Based Training for Enterprise Development (CBTED) approach. As former Chairperson of the Presidential Executive Task Force for Relief and Rehabilitation in Central Mindanao, he led an interagency effort to resettle evacuees and rebuild homes and communities affected by the armed conflict, using a collaborative approach in which LGUs, NGOs, and the evacuees themselves succeeded in building 3,000 houses in six (6) months.