It was my first time participating in the Philippine Startup Week held last November 9 to 12, 2026 at the MICE Center in Quezon City. I was there as one of the founders of GreenTayo, an initiative of the Mothers for Peace Social Enterprise, Inc. that is building the community infrastructure to make refilling local and natural home and personal care products accessible and affordable to grassroots communities.
GreenTayo is part of the pioneering cohort of seven ventures from Mindanao under Circulab, an acceleration program supported by the European Union-Philippines Green Economy Partnership and implemented by Upgrade Innolab, Inc.
Philippine Startup Week 2026 was an official side event of the Philippines’ ASEAN Chairship leading to the 49th ASEAN Summit in Metro Manila on November 16 to 18. It gathered founders, venture capitalists, and government agencies under the banner of “Beyond Borders,” with sessions on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, business automation, and digital transformation.
The event is billed as the country’s largest startup gathering and its organizers deserve credit for ambition. But the agenda reveals a narrowing of the Filipino imagination — innovation, in the official telling, is something that happens on a screen, is pitched to an investor, and is eventually scaled into an app. And I kept thinking: who decided that innovation only counts if it lives on a screen?
I am a woman from Mindanao who build with women’s social enterprises, farmers cooperatives, and youth in communities that have been told for generations that progress comes from somewhere else. In our world, innovation looks like a halal food hub run by women who figured out cold storage without a single line of code. It looks like a solar dryer designed with farmers so their harvest does not rot before market day. It looks like a “paluwagan” that moves money between families who trust each other more than they trust banks. None of that gets a stage at Startup Week. But all of it solves real problems.
And honestly, that blind spot isn’t an accident. It’s history. We were taught by colonial administrators that modernization means adopting Western tools, Western metrics, and Western ways of organizing. That lesson got rebranded as “startup culture.”
The model we’re told to copy is Silicon Valley: the solo genius, the rapid scale-up, the exit. The tech bro billionaire. But that model was never built for us. It does not understand bayanihan. In Mindanao, a business that survives is often a business that holds a community together.
In “startup culture,” people like me — Moro women, indigenous communities, persons with disabilities, informal workers, out-of-school youth — are usually invited into the startup conversation as “beneficiaries.” As the base of the pyramid. As a market segment. But we are not a market segment. We are innovators. The people closest to a problem are almost always closest to its solution.
If you want to fund innovation in Mindanao, don’t just fund an app that “empowers” us. Fund us. Give us patient capital (long-term investment with a tolerance for slower, steadier returns; the opposite of capital that demands a quick exit). Give us grants instead of equity. Let us define scale as something that can be replicated by other communities, not just by other startups.
The tech startup model runs on impatient capital — it needs fast growth, a big market, and a quick exit. That model fits an app that can scale to millions of users in two years. It does not fit a women’s social enterprise in Mindanao that is profitable, employs seven people, and grows steadily over a decade while anchoring a local economy. If you force that enterprise to chase venture-scale returns, you either break it or you exclude it from funding entirely.
I am not anti-technology. I love my iPhone, my apps, even social media. Tech is a tool. But it is not the only tool, and it is not the point. Not every social problem can be solved by making an app. Hunger is not a UX (user experience) problem. Violence against women is not a growth-hacking problem. A broken road to the market is not a blockchain problem.
Sometimes it’s a free school transport run by volunteers. Sometimes it’s a PWD-led urban farm on vacant land. Sometimes it’s a weaving cooperative keeping a culture alive by keeping its artisans paid.
Not every problem needs an app, and not every good enterprise needs to become a unicorn.
The Philippines needs to forge its own path. Not a copy of Silicon Valley. Not a copy of Singapore. Ours. A path that takes our culture seriously — our kinship networks, our faith, our sense of shared responsibility. A path where a startup can be a cooperative, where a founder can be a mother, where “scale” means more communities thriving, not more users downloading.
Philippine Startup Week should have a barangay stage, not just a community track. It should celebrate social enterprises the way it celebrates unicorns. It should invite the grassroots women I work with to speak, not just be spoken about.
So here’s my ask. To the organizers: widen the definition of innovation. To the investors: learn our language before you ask us to learn yours. To the young woman in Mindanao who wants to build something: don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t a startup just because it doesn’t have an app.
We already know how to innovate. We’ve been doing it with less for a long time. What we need now is for our ecosystem to finally see us — and to fund us on our own terms. ###
