NORIO Ogino, founder and chairman of Ogino Kensetsu Group of Companies in Tanba City, Hyogo Prefecture in western Japan, led a delegation of eight people to visit Bohol and renew ties with the founder and chairman of the BIT International College System, Atty. Dionisio D. Balite, PhD.
In the past four years, Ogino Group of Companies has provided paid one-year internships to engineering and technology students of BIT International College. There have been eighteen students on board the internship program, with nine students in its current cohort. The first and second cohorts of interns have returned to Bohol, graduated, and are currently looking for opportunities to work in Japan.
To commemorate his second visit to BIT IC and the Golden Jubilee of the founding of OGIKEN, Chairman Ogino made a sizeable cash donation to its partner in Bohol. The Board of Trustees of BIT IC has decided to use the remarkable donation to create a scholarship fund for graduating senior high school students from selected towns in the province to undertake higher education in either engineering or agriculture at any of the BIT IC campuses in Tagbilaran, Jagna, Talibon, or Carmen.
The scholarship fund which will be awarded to students from disadvantaged backgrounds strongly concurs with Chairman Ogino’s passion to help young people grow and acquire tertiary education and skills that will make them employable and competitive overseas. “I have been quite pleased with what I saw in the student interns from Bohol and BIT IC, their diligence and perseverance, and in appreciation of what they have shown to me in Japan, I would like to help more young people in Bohol,” Ogino revealed.
Founded in May 1975, Ogino Construction (OGIKEN, in Japanese), is a community-based general construction company, that count custom-built houses, public facilities, and commercial facilities as among its main product lines. It also operates a lumber processing and drying company that processes cedar and cypress trees at their in-house lumber factory, which is the among the largest in Hyogo Prefecture.
Located in an inland basin at an average elevation of 100 meters above sea level in the northeastern part of Hyogo Prefecture, Tanba is surrounded by high mountains and ricefields, and has a rural economy based on agriculture and forestry.
In their visit to Carmen town, the Japanese guests especially Chairman Ogino reveled in the quiet and the green expanse of the Balite Family Farm, which used to be the site of the Bohol Integrated Agriculture Project experimental farm project of Japan International Cooperation Agency in the late 1990s.
Chairman Ogino’s revelation of liking “to make things” gels with Atty. Balite’s advocacy of “nurturing dreams of young people, empowering them and transforming them, their family lives and communities through education.”
The bridge of cooperation that connects the two community industry leaders started with a bosom friend of Chairman Ogino being introduced to Atty. Balite’s oldest child who, back in the 1980s and 1990s, studied with a grant from what was then the Japanese Ministry of Education or Monbusho, or today, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology or Monbukagakusho.
Details on application requirements and procedures of the said scholarship will soon be posted on the BIT International College System Facebook webpage.
