ABSTRACT
SARILAKAS comes from the Tagalog Sariling Lakas which means “own strength”. It is the code name of a project initiated by the Bureau of Rural Workers in 1981 in cooperation with the ILO and the Dutch government. The project was, in fact, a re-orientation of an earlier project called Project AID (Action Identification for the Development of Landless Rural Workers) which was launched in July 1979. The change in the project’s title is more symbolic as the thrust and objective of Project AID had to be radically altered to “focus on providing external inputs of a catalytic nature only toward the generation and development of participatory people’s processes and self-reliant organizations of Rural Workers”.
