I recently participated in a wonderful workshop on Climate Sustainability for Entrepreneurs facilitated by Sustina and Upgrade Innolab last October 13-14, 2026 here in Davao City. This was part of Circulab, an acceleration program for circular ventures supported by the EU-PH Green Economy Partnership.
The circular venture that I co-founded is GreenTayo, an initiative of the Mothers for Peace Social Enterprise, Inc. that builds the community infrastructure that will make refiling local and natural home and personal care products accessible and affordable to grassroots communities. And I am proud that GreenTayo is one of only seven grantees (out of more than 50 applicants) in the Circulab pioneering cohort.
Yes, I have founded a startup venture in my 50s while caregiving for two loved ones. And this is what I realized — caregiving is climate sustainability work. It is the invisible infrastructure that keeps everything else standing.
When I am making sure Neil takes his anti-rejection medication at the right time after his kidney transplant, I am managing a fragile ecosystem. When I am checking my mother’s skin for lupus flare-ups, I am doing what women have always done — paying attention to the small signals before they become emergencies. Multiply that by millions of Filipino women, and you have a whole economy of care that nobody puts in the GDP and in resilience playbooks.
Eco-feminism has been saying this since the 1970s: the way we dominate nature and the way we sideline women come from the same bad habit — treating some work as “real” and the rest as invisible.
Cooking? Invisible. Laundry? Invisible. Keeping an 86-year old comfortable through a lupus flare while also managing a transplant patient’s medication routine? It does not happen magically. It happens because someone, usually a woman, is running on fumes and caffeine.
The numbers back this up. In the Philippines, women spend about 28 hours a week on unpaid care work — more than three times what men spend. That’s roughly 11 hours a day of cooking, cleaning, childcare, and elderly care. Women’s labor force participation is around 50.3 percent, compared to 72.5 percent for men. And among married women who are not working, 88 percent say household and family duties are the main reason. That is not a lifestyle choice. That is a structural traffic jam.
And it is about to get worse. The Philippines is expected to become an aging society by 2030, with older persons already around 8.5 percent of the population. Guess who is most likely to carry most of that care? Yes, women. People like me.
So when we talk about women leading sustainability, let us be honest about what that actually requires. I cannot sit on a watershed management board if I am the only one who knows my partner’s medication schedule. I cannot lead a coastal cleanup if nobody is watching my mother. I cannot run a circular enterprise if I am exhausted all the time. Systems have to include support for domestic chores, childcare, elderly care. Public investment, shared parental responsibility, community care cooperatives, and policies do not assume women are the default emergency contact for every human need. Support is not a bonus. It is the foundation.
Our Philippine culture gives us a head start, if we actually use it. Bayanihan — that beautiful spirit of communal unity and mutual help — has been practiced in Filipino communities for generations, especially during disasters. But let’s be honest. If bayanihan only shows up when there’s a disaster, it is more of a reunion than a revolution. We need everyday bayanihan. The kind that treats care as shared work, not women’s secret second shift. The kind that shows up for the caregiver, not just the calamity.
Filipino women are already leading in sustainability, often while carrying exactly this kind of load. In Mindanao alone, women are leading sustainability not through one single program, but through a mosaic of roles: ancestral-domain planners, forest defenders, geothermal resource managers, cooperative and enterprise leaders, climate-smart farmers, and climate-policy advocates. Their leadership tends to combine indigenous and local knowledge with formal governance, training, and market access. These women are not waiting for permission. They are leading. But they are leading while carrying way too much.
The Philippine Commission on Women (PCW) is working on a National Care Economy Policy Framework, also known as the Philippine Policy on Care Economy, with the help of Oxfam Pilipinas, which has been pushing to recognize unpaid care work in community resilience. This is good and we should normalize this. Let us invest in care infrastructure. Let us hold men to their share of domestic labor — not as “helpers,” but as equals. And let us make bayanihan an everyday habit, not just an emergency response.
This framework directly addresses the structural traffic jam I noted earlier. It moves the conversation from asking women to be superhuman caregivers to asking what systems will support them. The policy recognizes that a woman like me — managing care for two loved ones — cannot fully participate in sustainability leadership or the paid economy if the state does not help carry the load.
By reclaiming the public nature of care, the framework argues that care is not a private, familial burden but a shared responsibility. As PCW stressed: “care work should be a responsibility shared by all, not a burden borne disproportionately by women alone.”
The policy is still being finalized, but it represents a significant shift in policy thinking — one that sees your daily reality not as a personal problem to be managed, but as a systemic issue that the government has a duty to address.
Women are not sustainability leaders because they are magically closer to nature. That is an old myth that kept women in the kitchen and out of the boardroom and public spaces. Women are sustainability leaders because they have been forced to become experts in how everything connects — clean water, safe food, healthy kids, cared-for elders, and, yes, transplant medications and lupus flare-ups. They know in their bones that no economy can thrive on a dead planet, and no community can be resilient if its caregivers are running on fumes.
Yes, it is awesome that women are leading sustainability all over the country. But somebody needs to cook, do the dishes and the laundry. Bayanihan starts at home. Saving the planet and sharing the care work are the same job. It is not sustainability if we ask women to do them all. ###
