Gender Champions Capacity Building and Learning Exchange: Four Days of Leadership, GEDSI, and Community Facilitation in BARMM

Forty-plus participants from eight women cooperatives in Maguindanao joined a four-day Gender Champions learning exchange under the WFP–AGREA–AECID partnership in July 2026.

Four days, one shared purpose

From July 14 to 17, 2026, the Gender Champions Capacity Building and Learning Exchange brought together partners from the World Food Programme (WFP), local government units, the Cooperative and Social Enterprise Authority (CSEA), and eight women cooperatives from Maguindanao del Norte and Maguindanao del Sur.

The convening was not a lecture series delivered to a passive audience. It was structured as an exchange, a format that assumes the participants already carry knowledge from their own municipalities and cooperatives, and that the value of the four days lies in what they learn from one another as much as from any facilitator.

Across the four days, participants worked on leadership, interpersonal communication, and community facilitation skills. They deepened their understanding of Gender Equality, Disability, and Social Inclusion (GEDSI). They heard real-life stories and shared their own. And they developed action plans to carry back to their municipalities plans for championing inclusive, community-driven development in the places where they actually live and work.

What GEDSI means in this context

GEDSI is an acronym that is easy to recite and harder to practise. It stands for Gender Equality, Disability, and Social Inclusion—a framework for ensuring that development programmes reach and benefit people who are routinely excluded from decisions and resources.

In the BARMM context, that exclusion is documented. A 2024 WFP study, Leaving No One Behind, found that barriers such as climate-related risks hinder rural and Indigenous women from accessing resources and decision-making processes, resulting in lost livelihood opportunities and poverty. Poverty incidence and food insecurity remain among the highest in the country in BARMM, and WFP uses a conflict-sensitive approach in the region.

GEDSI training in this setting is not about adding a category to a checklist. It is about examining who is in the room when a cooperative makes a decision, who is absent, and why. It is about recognising that disability, ethnicity, age, and gender intersect to shape a person's access to land, credit, markets, and voice. And it is about building the practical skills, facilitation, communication, leadership—that allow a Gender Champion to change those patterns in her own community.

The cooperatives at the centre

The eight women cooperatives that participated are not abstract beneficiaries. They are organized groups with membership, leadership, and operational histories. The CSEA has registered hundreds of women-led cooperatives across the region 705 as of October 2025, alongside 192 women's associations and the eight in this exchange represent a subset that the project is working with directly.

Previous sessions under this collaboration have worked with cooperatives including the Kuliglig Bangsamoro Women Agriculture Cooperative in Rempes, Upi; the Gadungan SSB and Ummahat Mu'minats Agriculture Cooperative in Sultan sa Barongis; the Matuber Women's Organization in Datu Blah T. Sinsuat; and the Safagayun Tom Kiluhanan Farmers' Cooperative. The learning exchange brought representatives from these and other cooperatives together in a single space, an unusual opportunity for groups that usually operate in separate municipalities and face similar constraints in isolation.

That cross-cooperative dimension matters. A women's cooperative in Upi and a women's cooperative in Datu Blah T. Sinsuat may face comparable challenges, access to markets, record-keeping discipline, leadership transition, cultural expectations about women's roles, but they rarely have a structured occasion to compare notes. The learning exchange created one.

Why leadership and facilitation skills are treated as core, not ancillary

The exchange’s focus on leadership, interpersonal communication, and community facilitation reflects a design logic that runs through the broader project: technical agricultural training is necessary but insufficient.

A cooperative that produces well but cannot communicate internally will struggle to coordinate. A leader who understands GEDSI in principle but cannot facilitate a meeting where women feel safe to speak will not change who participates in decisions. A community that receives training but has no mechanism for raising concerns will not hold anyone accountable.

The skills taught over the four days are the connective tissue between production and governance. They are also the skills that allow a Gender Champion to do the work the title implies: not simply to hold a designation, but to convene conversations, challenge exclusion when it appears in ordinary decisions, and support other women to take on leadership roles.

The partnership behind the exchange

The learning exchange is part of the continuing collaboration between AGREA Foundation and WFP. That collaboration sits within a broader project: Empowering Indigenous Women through Nutrition-sensitive Interventions and Agriculture Livelihoods Support towards Improved Food and Nutrition Security and Climate Resilience.

The project is funded by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) with a contribution of PHP 45 million (approximately USD 780,000) and is implemented by WFP. It aims to reach 28,000 people from Indigenous and rural communities across BARMM.

WFP states that under the project, rural and Indigenous women undergo training in climate-resilient agriculture and leadership skills. The project aims to strengthen women's cooperatives by linking their agricultural production to reliable markets, and it incorporates social and behaviour change activities to improve local food and nutrition practices.

The AECID contribution is framed by the Spanish Cooperation as an effort to accelerate women's participation and leadership at all decision-making levels. Violeta Dominguez Acosta, Head of Spanish Cooperation in the Philippines, said at the project's launch: “If we are talking about climate resilience in a country most at risk of extreme climate, we must put indigenous women and their communities at the centre of the action.”

AGREA Foundation's role in the collaboration includes analytical and convening work. AGREA and WFP conducted an Intersectional Gender Analysis across BARMM, examining how gender intersects with ethnicity, location, livelihood, and age to shape women's access to resources and participation in community life. In December 2025, WFP, the Bangsamoro Women Commission, and AGREA Foundation convened workshops in Cotabato City on the Intersectional Gender Analysis and on Social and Behaviour Change strategy. The learning exchange is part of the capacity-building work that follows from that analysis.

The CSEA, as the BARMM agency mandated to support cooperatives and social enterprises, brings the institutional and regulatory dimension, the registration, technical assistance, and policy environment in which these cooperatives operate.

What the exchange does not yet prove

A four-day learning exchange is an input. It is not evidence that the Gender Champions have changed governance practices in their cooperatives, that GEDSI considerations have been integrated into municipal planning, or that women's participation in decision-making has increased.

Those outcomes depend on what happens after the participants return home: whether the action plans they developed are implemented, whether the cooperatives' leadership reinforces the practices discussed, whether local government units create space for the champions to contribute, and whether the project provides follow-up support rather than a single event.

The project’s market-linkage component creates a practical test. As the cooperatives engage more directly with buyers and with government programmes, their internal governance and their capacity to include diverse voices will shape what they can negotiate and what they can sustain. The exchange introduced skills and frameworks. The market will test whether they are used.

What comes next

For the Gender Champions, the immediate next step is to carry their action plans into their municipalities—to convene the conversations they planned, to apply the facilitation skills they practised, and to test whether the GEDSI lens changes how decisions are made in their cooperatives and communities.

For the cooperatives, the next step is to decide whether the practices introduced become institutional—written into meeting procedures, planning cycles, and leadership development—rather than remaining individual commitments.

For AGREA Foundation, WFP, CSEA, and AECID, the next step is to continue the collaboration and to track whether the exchange contributes to measurable shifts in women's participation and in the inclusion of marginalised groups. That tracking should be honest about what changes and what does not.

We are glad to have been part of convening this exchange alongside our partners at WFP, CSEA, the local government units, and the eight women cooperatives. The measure of the four days will be in the decisions that follow—not in the certificate of participation.

To learn more about AGREA Foundation's work with women's cooperatives in BARMM and its partnership with the World Food Programme, explore our official channels. Organisations interested in supporting this work can reach out through our contact page.