asean

When the world is in the brink of another collapse, women do not just agonize, they organize. That’s what the Women Strong Network is all about that came to Davao and Mindanao for the first time last March 12 to 14, 2026 at SM Lanang, Davao City.

Initiated by the Women’s Business Council Philippines, or WomenBizPH, the Women Strong Network is an ASEAN-focused capacity-building program for women entrepreneurs that fosters a “women helping women” community to boost visibility, skills, and networking opportunities.

Atty. Lorna P. Kapunan, who served as Past Chair and President of WomenBizPH and still serves as one of its Trustees, shared that they organized WomenBiz as a response to what they felt was women’s lack of representation in business councils such as chambers of commerce, employers federations, and exporters groups.

“Women lead and run majority of the micro and small enterprises in the country while the big corporations that are dominated by men form just one percent,” Atty. Lorna said. “Women must be leading the decision-making in industries that we run and operate and that is why we formed our own business council.”

With the Philippines chairing ASEAN this 2026 with the theme of “Navigating Our Future, Together,” WomenBizPH is making sure women entrepreneurs are visible and participating in all the decision-making processes at all levels and all areas in realizing the ASEAN Community Vision 2045.

Aside from the Women Strong Network Hybrid Trade Fair in Davao, WomenBizPH also organized the “ASEAN Knowledge Exchange on Regenerative Entrepreneurship for Mindanao and BARMM” at SMX Convention Center Davao. They were joined by the  ASEAN Women Entrepreneurs Network (AWEN), UN Women, Small Business Corporation (SBC), and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).

For ASEAN 2026, they want to make sure Mindanao women entrepreneurs are visible and have a voice in the regional cooperation body and that their contributions are recognized in ASEAN’s women-driven growth.

Yes, the evidence from ASEAN clearly shows that women are not just participants in the region’s growth — they are a primary, yet often under leveraged, engine driving it. Women in ASEAN are 625 million strong, half of the total population. Their contribution spans from the grassroots level of micro-enterprises to the highest echelons of trade policy.

But women are not just driving economic growth, they are transforming it through regenerative entrepreneurship.

Regenerative entrepreneurship is a paradigm shift from the dominant extractive economic model. It is not just about “doing less harm” such as reducing pollution or using recycled materials. It is about actively designing human systems and businesses that restore, renew, and revitalize their own sources of energy and materials, creating conditions for all life to thrive.

If we think of it in stages, they are: (1) Conventional – the dominant extractive economic model that “take-make-waste”; (2) Sustainable – do less harm like minimize waste and reduce energy use;  (3) Restorative – return systems to a healthy state like restoring a land it once polluted with harmful chemicals; (4) Regenerative – actively improving the health of the entire system where the business becomes a net positive force, enriching its community, its ecosystem, and its people.

A regenerative business is not just a profit-making entity. It is viewed as a living system nested within larger living systems — community, society, nature. Its success is measured not just by its bottom line, but by its contribution to the health and resilience of those larger systems.

Key characteristics of a regenerative enterprise include holistic design that is inspired by nature, where there is no waste because the output of one process becomes the input for another. There is also stakeholder integration — employees, community, customers, suppliers, and the environment — not just shareholders. It is place-based and contextual because it is deeply rooted in and responsive to its local ecology and community. It seeks to build capacity of its systems to thrive like improving soil health, building community wealth, and fostering employee well-being.

Women are leading regenerative entrepreneurship because of their social, historical, and structural positioning.

This is not about biological essentialism — the idea that women are inherently “more nurturing” (which is a gender stereotype). It is because under capitalism and patriarchy, women have been systematically assigned to the sphere of life that regenerative entrepreneurship seeks to elevate and emulate.

Women’s leadership is not just beneficial, but essential. Regenerative entrepreneurship requires a complete dismantling of the values at the core of the capitalist-patriarchal system  — domination, extraction, hierarchy, and infinite growth.

Women, and particularly women of color and indigenous women, have been the primary “other” in this system. They have been excluded from its centers of power and suffered most from its negative consequences. This outsider status gives them a crucial vantage point. They are less invested in defending a broken system that excluded them and are freer to imagine and build something entirely new.

Patriarchy has systematically devalued the work of care — raising children, tending to the sick, maintaining community, and ensuring daily well-being. This work has been made invisible, unpaid, and considered “women’s work,’ despite being the very foundation of a functioning society and economy.

Regenerative entrepreneurship, at its core, is about bringing this ethic of care into the heart of the economy. Women have centuries of lived experience in this domain. They understand that care is not a soft, fluffy concept, but a rigorous, demanding, and essential practice for sustaining life. Leading regeneratively means making this invisible work visible and placing it at the center of value creation.

Patriarchal leadership tends to be hierarchical, competitive, and focused on a single, dominant “hero.”  Regenerative systems thinking, by contrast, is collaborative, networked, and cyclical. It sees the whole, understands interconnections, and values the health of the entire web.

Women’s leadership styles, often socialized to be more collaborative, communicative, and inclusive, are a natural fit. Numerous studies show that diverse teams, especially those with significant female leadership, are more innovative and make better decisions. This is because they naturally incorporate more perspectives, mirroring diversity and interconnectivity of a healthy ecosystem. They are also more attuned to the long-erm consequences of today’s decisions on the next generation.

Grassroots solutions to social and environmental problems are overwhelmingly led by women. They are the ones organizing community gardens, starting mutual aid networks, and protecting local water resources. Regenerative entrepreneurship must be rooted in these lived realities.

Women’s leadership ensures that the solutions being built are not top-down, technocratic fixes, but are co-created with and by the communities most impacted. It is about healing the social fabric, repairing the damage done by centuries of extraction, and building local, resilient economies from the ground up.

Regenerative entrepreneurship is the economic expression of a post-patriarchal world. It is an economy designed to sustain life, not to accumulate capital. To build it, we must be led by those who have been the primary sustainers of life under the old, broken system. So women’s leadership is not just a matter of equity; it is a matter of strategic necessity and collective survival.