Leadership Rooted in Culture: A Governance Session with Indigenous Women of the STK Farmers' Cooperative

Forty-two members of the Safagayun Tom Kiluhanan Farmers' Cooperative joined a leadership and governance session under the AGREA–WFP collaboration, exploring leadership grounded in Indigenous tradition.

A safe space to talk about power

Leadership training often begins with a competency framework. This session began with a question about what leadership already looks like in the community.

Forty-two members of the Safagayun Tom Kiluhanan (STK) Farmers' Cooperative gathered for a Leadership and Governance session conducted through the continuing collaboration of AGREA Foundation and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). The session was designed as a safe space for reflection, learning, and shared experience—not a lecture delivered to passive participants.

The most substantive moments came when Indigenous women described leadership as they had learned it: respect for elders, collective decision-making, and responsibility for the community. These are not abstractions borrowed from a governance manual. They are practices that predate the cooperative and continue to shape how its members relate to one another.

That framing changes what a leadership session can accomplish. Instead of introducing an external model and asking participants to adopt it, the session started from what the community already values and asked how those values translate into the governance of a formal organization.

Leadership as service, not authority

The discussion drew a distinction that matters for cooperatives: leadership is not the same as holding a position.

Participants described leadership in terms of service, the protection of cultural heritage, and decisions that consider both present and future generations. In a cooperative, those commitments show up in concrete ways, how a chairperson handles a disagreement, whether a budget decision is explained to members, whether a younger woman is invited into a committee, whether a traditional practice is accommodated in the meeting calendar.

The session also addressed the strengthening of women's voices in leadership spaces. This is not a hypothetical concern in BARMM. WFP's own 2024 Leaving No One Behind study 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. A leadership session that names those barriers and examines them in a supported setting is one response to a documented gap.

The participant's reflection

One participant, Rechell Ann, described the session's value in practical terms. She said that understanding leadership and governance is key to becoming a more responsible and involved community member, and that inclusive leadership helps guide the cooperative, solve challenges, and ensure that every voice is heard, especially the voices of women, whose perspectives can strengthen growth and sustainability.

That is a statement about function, not sentiment. A cooperative that hears only from its officers will make decisions with incomplete information. A cooperative that creates channels for members, particularly women whose knowledge of household food security, processing, and local markets is often detailed and practical, will make better decisions. The session framed inclusion as a governance advantage, not a courtesy.

Why this session sits inside a larger project

The STK session is one component of a broader programme: 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 explicitly includes leadership training. WFP states that rural and Indigenous women will undergo training in climate-resilient agriculture and leadership skills, and that the project will strengthen women's cooperatives by linking their agricultural production to reliable markets. The activities also incorporate social and behaviour change to improve local food and nutrition practices.

The leadership component is therefore not an adjunct. It is one of the project's stated delivery areas, alongside agricultural training and market linkage. The logic is that a cooperative's ability to produce, negotiate, and sustain an enterprise depends on how well it governs itself, and that women's participation in that governance is a condition for the project's market objectives to be achieved.

AGREA Foundation, the BARMM Government, and WFP have also hosted a learning exchange for Indigenous and rural women focused on improving leadership and communication skills as gender champions, supporting them to lead community dialogues on food security and develop plans to sustain women-led community projects. The STK session reflects that same approach at the cooperative level.

What the session does not yet prove

A leadership and governance session with 42 participants is an input. It is not evidence that the cooperative's decision-making has changed, that women's participation in leadership roles has increased, or that governance practices have become more transparent.

Those outcomes depend on what happens next: whether the cooperative's meetings create space for the perspectives the session encouraged, whether its officers adopt the practices discussed, and whether the broader project provides follow-up support rather than a single visit. The project's market-linkage component creates a practical test. As the cooperative engages with buyers and government programmes, its governance will shape what it can negotiate and what it can sustain.

What the session does establish is that the conversation happened, that 42 members, most of them Indigenous women, sat together and examined what leadership means in their own context. That is a beginning. It is not a conclusion.

What comes next

For the participants, the next step is to carry the discussion into the cooperative's ordinary work: its assemblies, its planning, its internal disagreements, and its dealings with the institutions it depends on.

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 governance. That tracking should be honest about what changes and what does not.

A note of appreciation

To the members of the Safagayun Tom Kiluhanan Farmers' Cooperative who participated, and to the women who spoke about leadership as their communities have practised it: 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 Indigenous 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.