JOSELITO S. ALMARIO, “Itoy” to friends and colleagues at the Department of Finance (DOF), posted a Twitter message on July 4 on how microinsurance works. It would be his last because, two weeks later, in the early-morning hours of Monday, he would be dead of suspected cancer and leave behind a wife, five kids and millions of grieving microfinance beneficiaries from around the country. He was only 59.
For those who know Boss Itoy, as colleagues fondly call him, his is the face of microfinance and microinsurance. As director of Fiscal Policy and Planning at the DOF, he helped give birth to a government program that in the 1980s sought to address the risk and funding requirements of the very poor that the large banks and financial institutions would merely sidestep for fear of default.
The past 10 years, as deputy executive director of the National Credit Council, Boss Itoy helped formulate and develop the Philippine National Strategy and Regulator Framework for Microinsurance and provided overall guidance and direction in pursuing a microinsurance project supported by the Asian Development Bank and the German International Cooperation or GIZ.
His involvement in the program helped catapult an industry that policy planners in the waning years of President Corazon Aquino targeted to touch the lives of more or less 5 million poor Filipinos by mobilizing an estimated P5 billion, mostly from the private sector.
This was the period when financial inclusion was something only talked about in the corridors of the DOF and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), when microfinance and microinsurance were “unsexy” subjects barely covered in the financial pages of the nation’s news broadsheets, if at all. Boss Itoy would fly to any destination in the Philippines to train the trainors that would help propagate the idea that the poor are not only viable borrowers of commercial funds but superior even. The repayment rate among microfinance borrowers is 99 percent, a number that BSP Governor Amando M. Tetangco Jr., also a towering figure in the microlending program, proudly tells everyone and sundry.
Such was the zeal of microfinance proponents like Boss Itoy that there are now 176 thrift and rural banks around the country serving 1.2 million so-called micro clients that have drawn on P11.4 billion worth of loans as of end-2014.
Those who covered developments in public finance would, at some point, inquire where Boss Itoy was because his third-floor office at the DOF was often empty. Later, when it all becomes clear, they understand why the financial press calls him Mr. Peripatetic, out of admiration and respect for the man who would fly at a moment’s notice to spread the gospel of microlending, microinsurance and the often untold story of the unbanked Filipino.
Only recently, Boss Itoy was designated Philippine representative to the Asean Expert Panel on SME Finance, no doubt in recognition of work done in a field that he could just as quickly drop and work for private employers instead and for much more pay than the salary he receives as a state employee. Like a good number of other DOF officials and rank and filers, Boss Itoy opted to serve in the public sphere no matter the appeal of higher pay for a position in the World Bank or its sister organization, the International Monetary Fund, where he was already seconded for a three-year stint in Washington, D.C.
He will be missed.