Denilin Avila’s research while affiliated with University of the Philippines Cebu and other places

Today the world observes the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, first commemorated in Paris in 1987 and subsequently receiving official designation by the United Nations. It is a day for renewing commitment to the human project – to enable universal human development, making it possible for all humans to achieve their highest potential – and to reflect on poverty, how it thwarts human development, and how it might disappear. The challenge is not new, but it achieves new urgency as we start to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and realize that the damage it caused, to well-being and human development, was deeply intensified by poverty. This volume aims for accelerated growth of knowledge about poverty, its causes and consequences, its links to crises and disasters, its connections to inequality and fairness, the direction and speed of its trajectory in different contexts, and strategies for reducing it and their assessment.

Introduction Higher Education Institutions play a role in poverty reduction by implementing community extension programs focusing on capacity building and entrepreneurship training. Cebu Technological University programs offer these programs through various skills training to its targeted beneficiaries. This study aims to assess the community extension Micro-, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs) entrepreneurial activities concerning poverty reduction. The research participants are beneficiaries of community extension programs that primarily focus on capacity building and entrepreneurship training, and they eventually become entrepreneurs. Method Using a cross-sectional survey, 172 valid responses were analyzed, with entrepreneurship education (EE), budgeting financial literacy (BFL), access to credit facilities (ACF), and entrepreneurial performance (EP) as predictors of poverty reduction (PR). Results from Partial Least Squares - Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) generate insights from the seven hypothesized paths of the proposed model. Results and discussion Findings revealed that entrepreneurship education (β = 0.258, p < 0.05), budgeting financial literacy (β = 0.147, p < 0.05), and access to credit facilities (β = 0.541, p < 0.001) help reduce poverty. However, no significant relationship was found between entrepreneurial performance and poverty reduction (β = 0.132, ns ) whose cause may be directly pointed to the pandemic's significant impact on MSME's entrepreneurial activities. Conclusion This study confirms the importance of entrepreneurship education, budgeting, financial literacy, and credit access in promoting entrepreneurial success and reducing poverty.