Ateneo, La Salle to formalize five-year social-enterprise pact

By Daniel Okafor

Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) and De La Salle University (DLSU) will sign a five-year agreement on Nov. 19 to advance social entrepreneurship, according to the Manila Bulletin. The deal pairs the Ateneo Center for Social Entrepreneurship (ACSEnt) with the Lasallian Social Enterprise for Economic Development (LSEED). It extends work the two centers began in 2023.

The Manila Bulletin published its report on Nov. 1, 2026.

What does the five-year pact cover?

The Manila Bulletin said the agreement “seeks to empower social entrepreneurship and sustainable development among higher educational institutions.” The pact has three stated academic routes:

• Integrate social entrepreneurship into academic curricula.
• Integrate social entrepreneurship into research agendas.
• Integrate social entrepreneurship into the schools’ formation programs.

In practical terms, the pact resembles curriculum reform more than a conference series. The report says the centers expect to integrate social entrepreneurship into how students learn, how research priorities develop, and how formation programs operate. It identifies no specific course, study, or module.

The distinction gives the agreement a clear academic structure. Curriculum work embeds the subject in formal teaching. Research agendas connect it to inquiry and evidence. Formation programs extend it into student development work. Those are the three routes named by the Manila Bulletin, and each remains undefined on timing, scale, and ownership.

How will the centers operate the agreement?

The five-year term fixes the partnership’s duration, while the Manila Bulletin’s announcement leaves its budget, enrollment targets, staffing commitments, governance arrangements, funding model, and performance metrics unspecified.

The Manila Bulletin identifies two operating tasks:

• Mobilize internal and external stakeholders to promote social entrepreneurship.
• Share their best practices.

Mobilization brings campus and outside participants into the field, while practice-sharing lets each center use lessons developed by the other under the five-year arrangement. The Manila Bulletin names neither the outside participants nor a method for selecting, documenting, or transferring those practices.

What did ACSEnt and LSEED build in 2023?

ACSEnt and LSEED first partnered in 2023, the Manila Bulletin reported. Their collaboration produced three named initiatives: The Collective Good initiative, SE Talks, and Social Enterprise Profiling.

The Nov. 19 agreement builds on that program base. The Manila Bulletin said the 2023 partnership “led to several initiatives,” but gave no participant count, spending figure, event schedule, or measured result for the earlier work.

The missing figures prevent a reliable estimate of the new pact’s scale or impact. Based on the disclosed record, the five-year deal extends a working relationship whose public results remain mostly unquantified.

Why formalize a university partnership?

The Manila Bulletin framed Ateneo and La Salle as fierce basketball rivals that share a vision for academic excellence off the court. The agreement turns that shared orientation into a five-year commitment with a specific subject: social entrepreneurship and sustainable development.

The agreement’s stated structure joins teaching, research, formation, and stakeholder work within one institutional pact. The five-year term gives the centers time to test shared methods. The report presents no completed results under the new agreement and names no targets against which to judge progress.

No financial scale or commercial arrangement accompanies the announcement, and the Manila Bulletin presents an academic and institutional agreement while naming no private companies, investors, government partners, or other outside actors tied to the deal.

External participation remains part of the plan because the centers intend to mobilize internal and external stakeholders. The source leaves those groups unspecified. The planned network would draw from beyond the two campuses, but the record offers no way to measure it.

What should the agreement clarify?\n

For the five-year pact to take effect in teaching and research, the universities will need to convert three broad commitments into specific work:

• Named curriculum changes.
• Defined research projects.
• Scheduled stakeholder or practice-sharing activities.

That requirement follows from the scope the Manila Bulletin described. The report already supplies the core terms: the Nov. 19 signing, five-year duration, partner centers, three academic routes, and three initiatives dating to 2023. It does not supply money, targets, governance terms, or success measures.

After Nov. 19, the key test will be whether the centers turn shared practice into a named curriculum change or research project with a schedule and responsible unit. The five-year term supplies time for that work; the announcement supplies no outcome yet.