In brief:
DEVELOPERS Foundation, Inc. promotes sustainable rural community development among the very poor, remote farmers, women, and fisherfolk in the Philippines.

To help strengthen Philippine rural folk in addressing the challenges of hunger, poverty, social inequity, learned helplessness and a degraded environment through collective action and grassroots movements for sustainable agriculture, natural resource management and increased productivity in farming and coastal areas, livelihood development, increased democratic participation in governance, land tenure improvement and community food security.

Based on an approach that is community-based, people-directed, economically productive and ecologically sound, the Foundation seeks to empower the rural poor to work together to improve their quality of life as they define it, and exercise sustained leadership from the local people, especially women in rural development.

DEVELOPERS FOUNDATION, INC. believes in the centrality of people's self-collective action in improving their lives and in building better communities. It affirms that when people are given the opportunity to mobilize and maximize the resources made available to them, they are able to direct their efforts toward self-development and them shaping of a humane, stable, fraternal, peaceful, healthful and productive society.

The Foundation believes that development work must be wholistic, sustained and continually improving, and that it must be based on real and perceived needs of local people, in line with their dreams and aspirations, and adapted to their current and potential capabilities for self-direction and self- management. This way, development initiatives will become instruments to facilitate a dynamic social process where the restoration of hope, development of self-assertion, popular participation and self- government of the people work together and advance their socioeconomic and environmental development objectives.

DEVELOPERS Foundation subscribes to the COCOBREAD framework derived from reflective practicioners in the Philippines, of sustainable integrated area development. The COCOBREAD framework stands for:

GEOGRAPHIC REACH AND SCOPE OF WORK

Reach
Although a national NGO, Developers Foundation works almost entirely in Region 6, the Western Visayas. Currently our operations are concentrated in Aklan Province, and we have an expansion area inside Capiz Province. We are presently working in nine towns in Aklan, and one town in Capiz. They include Balete, Banga, Altavas, Lesso, Makato, Tangalan, Batan (all in Aklan) and Dumarao (in Capiz). In the next two years, Developers may be opening new operations in at least two additional towns in Capiz, two towns in Aklan, and one town in the Province of Negros Occidental.