This school year, more than 800 students in Tacloban City will welcome the start of classes with a new and improved school building courtesy of Cebuana Lhuillier, the country’s leading microfinancial solutions provider.
As part of its corporate social responsibility advocacy for education, Cebuana Lhuillier donated a two-storey, six-classroom, school building to the Northern Tacloban City National High School through the initiative of Cebuana Lhuillier’s President and CEO Jean Henri Lhuillier and through the efforts of its corporate social responsibility arm—the Cebuana Lhuillier Foundation, Inc..
Four of the classrooms will host regular high school classes while one room will be dedicated to Cebuana Lhuillier’s Alternative Learning System Community Learning Center (ALS CLC) which provides educational opportunities to out-of-school youth and adult learners. The remaining room will be used as an activity area for the Five Empowering Fields of Knowledge namely Livelihood, Financial Literacy, Disaster Resiliency, Sports Development, and Information and Communication Technology Competitiveness.
“This specific project is deeply rooted on our goal of empowering our youth, giving them hope, honing their true potential, and investing in their future. Through this donation, we hope to provide not just affordable and quality education to hundreds of deserving Yolanda-survivor children but also to provide good school facilities and spark new interest in sports among them,” Lhuillier said.
The six classrooms will be donated equipped with appointments including new arm chairs, teacher’s tables with chairs, stacking cabinets, standing bookshelves, a desktop computer, a medicine cabinet, a first aid kit, a movable whiteboard, and disaster preparedness kits, among others.
Aside from addressing the shortage of quality classrooms and education opportunities in Tacloban City, Cebuana Lhuillier is also pushing sports, specifically tennis, to the youth by integrating a special module of Sports Development to Cebuana Lhuillier’s ALS CLCs. The donated classrooms are named after the six international tennis players of the International Premiere Tennis League team Philippine Mavericks (formerly Manila Mavericks)—Tsonga, Flipkens, Nestor, Moya, Huey, and Philippoussis—which Lhuillier manages and co-owns.