COTABATO CITY (June 30, 2025) — A foreign-assisted mushroom propagation project in South Upi, Maguindanao del Sur of rescued child laborers is gaining headway, now attracting support from various sectors and an influential business group in the Bangsamoro region.
The project, a joint initiative of the families of more than a hundred former child laborers, mostly from non-Moro ethnic Teduray families, the International Labour Organization of the United Nations, the education, labor and employment ministries of the Bangsamoro government and local executives in South Upi, was launched just four months ago.
The mushroom propagation project in Barangay Looy in South Upi was shown to guests during the late commemoration last week in the municipality of the yearly June 12 World Day Against Child Labour.
The lawyer-entrepreneur Ronald Hallid Dimacisil Torres, chairman of the Bangsamoro Business Council that has members in all five provinces and three cities in the autonomous region, said on Monday, June 30, that they are ready to help connect the children and their parents operating the project to potential mushroom buyers in trading hubs close to their business establishments.
“This is a project worth supporting. We in our business council are strongly against employment of children as laborers and combatants. There is no problem with us supporting this foreign-assisted project,” Torres said.
The ILO’s Mindanao project staff, Elias Salazar, said they are grateful to the agencies of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and the local government unit of South Upi for helping push the project forward.
The ILO and cooperating agencies had facilitated the return to schools in South Upi of the children rescued in the past 12 months while selling food and other commercial goods in the streets, working in agricultural farms and in the markets to earn extra money for the needs of their families.
“Now their work is light. They do some chores in their mushroom gardens when they get home from school. They earn something from it without strenuous physical exertions,” South Upi Vice Mayor Reynalbert Insular, a staunch supporter of the project, said.
Photo depicts mothers of ex-child laborers showing to reporters the mushrooms produced in their gardens in Barangay Looy that they sell in the markets. (JFU, June 30, 2025, Cotabato City)