Leadership and Governance in a Bangsamoro Women’s Cooperative: Inside a Session on Power, Voice, and Service

Thirty-two members of the SSB Ummahat Muninats Agriculture Cooperative joined a leadership and governance session under the AGREA–WFP partnership, discussing women’s leadership, cultural barriers, and collective responsibility.

The question behind the session

What does it mean to lead a cooperative when the wider community still expects decisions to be made by men?

That question ran through a Leadership and Governance session with 32 participants from the SSB Ummahat Muninats Agriculture Cooperative, conducted through the continuing collaboration of AGREA Foundation and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). The session examined the role of women in leading and contributing to the development of their cooperatives and communities, and it did not avoid the structural obstacles that shape that role.

Discussions focused on the qualities of effective leaders—honesty, accountability, commitment, and service to others. Participants reflected on the challenges women often face in leadership and decision-making, particularly in communities where their participation may be limited by cultural and social norms.

What the cooperative brings to the table

The cooperative is not a new or fragile entity. Under its documented full name, the Gadungan SSB and Ummahat Mu’minats Agriculture Cooperative in Sultan sa Barongis, Maguindanao del Sur, it is an active local institution that has accessed agricultural livelihood support from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Agrarian Reform in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (MAFAR BARMM). In July 2025, MAFAR distributed goats to five cooperatives across Maguindanao del Sur, Maguindanao del Norte, and the Special Geographic Area, and the Gadungan SSB and Ummahat Mu’minats Agriculture Cooperative was among the recipients. It also received protective netting to establish enclosures for its livestock.

That matters for how the leadership session should be read. The participants were not learning about cooperatives for the first time. They were members of an existing enterprise with a track record of accessing government support and managing a livelihood activity. The session built on what they already carry: operational experience, membership relationships, and a stake in the cooperative’s future.

“Ummahat” is a term with religious and social resonance in Bangsamoro communities, referring to a grassroots network of women and mothers within Moro Islamic Liberation Front communities. The cooperative’s name situates it within that tradition, a women-led organization rooted in community structures that predate any single development project.

The barrier named in the room

The session did not treat women’s underrepresentation in leadership as an abstract problem. It surfaced it in the participants’ own words.

“Sa amin kasi na Bangsamoro, kahit marami nang babaeng lider, may mga limitasyon pa rin. Kadalasan, mga kalalakihan pa rin ang namumuno at sila pa rin ang mas may malaking bahagi sa pagdedesisyon,” shared Mo hairan Dimalido, a member of the cooperative.

Translated: “Among us in the Bangsamoro, even though there are already many women leaders, there are still limitations. Often, men still lead and they still have a larger share in decision-making.”

The statement is precise. It does not claim that women are absent from leadership. It acknowledges that women have taken on leadership roles and then identifies what persists alongside that presence: a pattern in which formal authority and substantive decision-making power remain disproportionately held by men. That distinction matters. Representation without decision-making authority is not the same as shared governance.

The session’s design responded to that diagnosis. Participants were encouraged to recognize their capabilities, actively share their ideas, and take on leadership roles within their organizations. The discussion emphasized that leadership is not limited to holding a position but involves taking initiative, influencing positive change, and serving as a role model for others.

That reframing is practical, not rhetorical. In a cooperative, leadership shows up in specific acts: proposing an agenda item, questioning a budget line, volunteering to manage a negotiation with a buyer, mentoring a newer member, or insisting that a decision be documented and explained. These are the behaviors that distribute power beyond the chairperson’s seat.

Why this session exists within a larger project

The leadership and governance session is one component of 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.

The project’s design includes three connected areas of work. 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 behavior change activities to improve local food and nutrition practices.

The leadership component is not an add-on. WFP’s own framing connects the training directly to a documented problem: 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 the loss of livelihood opportunities and poverty. Leadership training is one response to that finding. It addresses the decision-making gap alongside the resource gap.

AGREA Foundation’s role in the project 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 leadership session with the SSB Ummahat cooperative is part of the capacity-building work that follows from that analysis.

What the session asked participants to do

The session’s content moved between reflection and practice. Participants explored the importance of teamwork, transparent decision-making, and collective responsibility in achieving the goals of their cooperative. They were encouraged to become more confident in expressing their perspectives and participating in decision-making processes.

The emphasis on transparent decision-making is worth pausing on. Cooperatives are democratic organizations in principle, but in practice, governance can concentrate around a small group if processes are not deliberate. Transparency, clear records, explained decisions, accessible meetings, and avenues for members to raise concerns is the mechanism through which democratic ownership becomes real rather than formal.

The session also linked women’s leadership to outcomes beyond the cooperative itself. The brief states that empowering women leaders and promoting inclusive governance can strengthen cooperatives, improve organizational performance, and contribute to more resilient families and sustainable community development. That chain is plausible, but it is a statement of intent, not a measured result. The session did not report changes in the cooperative’s governance practices, decision-making patterns, or performance. Those would be medium-term outcomes requiring follow-up to assess.

What the quotation does and does not claim

Mo hairan Dimalido’s reflection is an observation about context, not a declaration of victory. It names a constraint without claiming that the constraint has been removed.

That is the appropriate register for a learning session. A one-day workshop does not dismantle social norms. It can, however, give participants a shared language for naming those norms, a structured opportunity to examine them, and a reason to test new behaviors in a supported setting. Whether those behaviors persist depends on what happens next, inside the cooperative’s meetings, in its dealings with buyers and government agencies, and in the households and communities where members live.

The session’s value lies in the space it created for that examination. Thirty-two members of an existing cooperative sat together and discussed who leads, who decides, and what service-oriented leadership requires. That conversation is not the end of the work. It is a condition for it.

What comes next

The immediate next step is for participants to carry the discussion back into their cooperative’s regular operations, its assemblies, its planning cycles, its negotiations, and its internal disputes. The project’s market-linkage component will provide a practical test: as the cooperative engages more directly with buyers and with government programs, the quality of its internal governance will shape what it can negotiate and what it can sustain.

For AGREA Foundation and WFP, the next step is to continue the collaboration and to track whether the leadership sessions contribute to measurable shifts in women’s participation in cooperative decision-making. That tracking should be honest about what changes and what does not.

A note of appreciation

To the 32 members who participated, and to the cooperative that convened them: the willingness to examine how power works inside your own organization is a form of accountability. It is harder than discussing external barriers, and it is more useful.

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