Tagum City wins the Hall of Fame Award for being three-time Outstanding Local Government Unit (Component City category) winner in the National Literacy Awards in the years 2001, 2008, and 2010.
The City’s literacy packaged with livelihood programs helped develop the potentials of the constituents in the community specifically those in the marginalized sectors.
The programs include the following:
– Consistent implementation of functional literacy programs that reach out to learners of different ages, ethnicity, and gender, and taught in ways where learners are able to develop their artistic potentials, build their small enterprises, or get work in their locality or abroad
– Balik Sigla program where masseurs trained by the LGU are hired to give therapy to constituents who suffer from immobility due to heart attack or stroke; service is provided in all barangays based on a mapping done by the LGU. More than a thousand have graduated from this program and some of them are now earning through private practice in Tagum, where they have set up their clinics with the help of the LGU. Still others were accredited by TESDA and were able to work abroad.
– Indigenous education – the young generation of indigenous communities taking pride in their culture and history as they learn the dances and rituals from their ancestors through education programs with the LGU; shared through the yearly festival held in the City
– Organic farming – conversion of waste from the butchery and the market into organic fertilizer and training of more than 100 farmers in organic farming using the compost.
Indeed, Tagum City is an LGU to reckon with. Its good literacy and livelihood practices have proven to be enabling mechanisms that contributed to the empowerment of its people, the Tagumeños and for other LGUs to benefit from through replication of the programs.
The same programs brought Tagum City to the 2011 UNESCO Literacy Awards, winning for its City Literacy Coordinating Council the Honorable Mention in the 2011 King Sejong Prize for Literacy.