Weaving as Enterprise: A GEDSI Workshop on Circular Business Models with Mamanwa Artisans in Del Carmen

AGREA's two-day workshop in Del Carmen brought Mamanwa artisans together with People's Organizations to work on circular business models, packaging, and branding for indigenous weaving.

The material comes first

Before a woven bag is a product, it is a plant.

In Surigao del Norte, one of the fibres Mamanwa weavers work with is baliw — a local plant material abundant in the province and used as the primary material for traditional weaving into bags, baskets, and other handicrafts. In Tagana-an, a municipality on the mainland facing Siargao across the strait, the craft had gone dormant for a decade before a 2025 training brought it back. The participants were the Binayloay Mamanwa Weavers Association.

That detail — an association, not a group of individuals — is where a weaving workshop and a business workshop diverge.

From 17 to 18 August 2026, AGREA Foundation held the Para sa Isla workshop on Circular Business Models Tailored to GEDSI-Led Enterprises (Indigenous Weaving) at the Women's Center in Del Carmen, Surigao del Norte. People's Organizations and community stakeholders worked through inclusive, sustainable circular enterprises built around indigenous weaving, sustainable packaging, branding, and enterprise development. Mamanwa artisans and partner institutions led hands-on demonstrations in traditional weaving using bamboo, rattan, and baliw leaves, and participants explored value-added products and eco-friendly packaging.

The workshop treated Mamanwa craftsmanship as a living part of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices — not as heritage to be preserved in a display case, but as a body of technique that can carry an enterprise.

Why the session was about business models, not technique

A weaving demonstration teaches a hand movement. A workshop on circular business models asks a different set of questions: who owns the loom, who buys the fibre, who prices the product, who negotiates with the buyer, who keeps the record of what was sold, and what happens to the offcuts.

Those questions are where most craft livelihoods fail — not at the point of skill, but at the point of organisation.

The Mamanwa are one of the first settlers of the Caraga region, and their culture is documented as rooted in skilled crafts including weaving. Their population was recorded at roughly 203,000 in the 2010 census, distributed across Surigao del Norte and Agusan del Norte. Traditional forms still woven by Mamanwa women include the alat, a rattan pack basket; the bangkil, a loosely woven rattan basket; the balugbog, a large rattan basket carried by shoulder or head straps; and the ligo, a rice winnowing basket.

Those are working objects, designed for specific tasks in a farming and forest economy. Turning them into a product line that reaches buyers outside the province requires something the objects themselves do not supply: an organisation that can produce consistently, price deliberately, and market credibly.

The Tagana-an experience illustrates the point. When the DTI Negosyo Center training revived the craft in September 2025, the weavers — with guidance from the Municipal Agriculture Office — organised themselves into an association and held an election, explicitly to manage future projects, secure resources, and collectively market their products. Datu Bahandi of the Binayloay Mamanwa Weavers Association described the training as bringing "not only new skills but also renewed purpose and a path toward a more sustainable future," and said the tools, knowledge, and market access had given the community "the confidence to turn our passion and hard work into a sustainable business."

That is the transition a two-day workshop on business models is trying to make legible in advance, rather than learning it the hard way.

What GEDSI-led actually means

The workshop's title places GEDSI at the centre — "circular business models tailored to GEDSI-led enterprises" — and the term deserves precision, because it is often used loosely.

Philippine government agencies define Gender Equality, Disability and Social Inclusion as efforts to ensure that people from all backgrounds, including women and gender diverse people, people with a disability, and people facing other forms of marginalisation, can equitably access, use, contribute to, influence and benefit from the design, development and governance of a programme or institution. A GEDSI lens, in that definition, is used to prevent unintended harm, exclusion, and further marginalisation of at-risk groups, and to promote their rights, equitable opportunities and benefits.

That is a higher bar than consultation. It is a claim about who influences design and governance, not only who receives a benefit.

Applied to a weaving enterprise, the questions become concrete. Who decides the designs — the weaver, or a buyer in Manila? Are the patterns attributed to the community that developed them, or absorbed into a brand's aesthetic? Can a member with a disability participate in the step of the process she can do, rather than being excluded from the whole? Are older weavers compensated for teaching, or is their knowledge treated as freely available? Does the association's leadership rotate, or does it sit with one family?

None of those questions has an easy answer, and a two-day workshop will not settle them. What the session could do is name them as business decisions rather than cultural ones — which is where they are usually decided, quietly.

The circular economy argument

The circular case for indigenous weaving is not metaphorical. It rests on specific material flows.

Buri, a native non-timber forest product, is the material used by Mamanwa women weavers in the ancestral domain of CADT 134 in Surigao del Norte. Eleven skilled women weavers, supported by eleven full-time workers, craft buri bags whose designs incorporate traditional Mamanwa patterns and colours. The United Nations Development Programme has described that work as embodying "how they weave biodiversity conservation and sustainable livelihood together," and as "a model for resilience and women-led innovation."

The circularity operates at three levels.

The fibre is renewable and locally harvested. A non-timber forest product can be gathered without felling the tree, which means the livelihood depends on the forest remaining standing. That is an unusual alignment of incentive: the weaver's income is a reason to protect the watershed.

The processing is low-input. Weaving converts raw plant material into a durable good through hand labour, with minimal energy and no synthetic feedstock. The carbon profile is a by-product of the technique, not a marketing claim.

The waste is a design problem. Offcuts, short strips, and rejected pieces are where a weaving enterprise either loses value or recovers it. AGREA's own framing of the Para sa Isla Project describes this precisely: "Participants are gaining a deeper understanding of how waste can become value, how organic materials can be composted and returned to the soil, and how sustainable livelihoods can emerge from what was once discarded." The same framing insists that the project is "not introducing entirely new systems" but "enhancing and connecting what already exists."

For a weaving workshop, that principle has a direct application. The Mamanwa have been managing plant material for generations. The circular economy vocabulary is new; the practice is not.

Packaging and branding: the documented gap

The workshop's inclusion of sustainable packaging and branding is not a soft add-on. It addresses a weakness that research on Philippine weaving enterprises has identified repeatedly.

A study of the traditional weaving industry in Lagawe, Ifugao — described as a vital cultural and economic asset rooted in indigenous knowledge and craftsmanship — found that the sector faces challenges in branding, product innovation, and packaging. Specifically, packaging lacked labelling, including care instructions and cultural context, which the researchers found weakened branding and customer education.

That is a precise diagnosis. A buyer who does not know what a piece is made of, how to care for it, or where the pattern comes from cannot value it properly — and cannot explain it to anyone else. The absence of a label is not a cosmetic deficiency. It is a missing piece of the product's value.

There is evidence that closing the gap produces measurable returns. When DOST Region 10 supported the Damugu Weavers Association, interventions that produced lasting and more vibrant colours increased the selling price or value of the products by nine percent. The same programme supported product promotion, trademark registration for intellectual property protection, and better packaging and labelling.

Packaging also has a demand-side rationale specific to 2026. The Extended Producer Responsibility Act, Republic Act No. 11898, requires large enterprises to recover and divert a growing percentage of their plastic packaging waste, with recovery targets rising to 60 percent in 2026, 70 percent in 2027, and 80 percent from 2028 onward. That obligation creates a market for packaging that is not plastic — including woven and plant-fibre packaging from exactly the kind of enterprise the workshop was convened to strengthen.

The connection is not automatic. A large beverage company required to recover plastic is not going to buy handwoven baskets to comply. But the policy environment is moving in a direction that makes fibre-based, locally made, reusable packaging more commercially interesting than it was five years ago. A workshop that puts weavers in the same room as packaging design is a workshop that positions them to notice that.

The unfinished business of protection

Weaving is a cultural expression as well as a product, and the legal framework around it is genuinely contested.

The Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act, Republic Act No. 8371, grants indigenous communities ownership and control over their cultural manifestations and rituals, and contains provisions on safeguarding Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices including knowledge and practices concerning nature. That is the foundation.

But the adequacy of that protection has been publicly questioned. In Senate deliberations on indigenous weaving, one senator argued that the provisions under the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act and the Intellectual Property Code are "inadequate," and there have been repeated legislative attempts to create specific protections for indigenous peoples' cultural properties on the grounds that RA 8371 does not provide for them specifically.

For a weaving enterprise, this matters commercially. A pattern that can be copied freely by a manufacturer with cheaper labour and faster looms is a pattern that cannot sustain a livelihood for the community that developed it. Trademark registration, which DOST supported for the Damugu weavers, protects a brand. It does not necessarily protect a design tradition.

The article does not resolve that question, and the workshop did not either. What the session could do is put it in front of weavers as a business risk, alongside pricing and cash flow.

Why this workshop existed inside this grant

The activity was not a standalone cultural event. It sits inside a specific funding instrument whose design explains a great deal about the workshop's shape.

The Para sa Isla Project is implemented by AGREA Foundation with iLAJA and the Municipal Government of Del Carmen, through the EU–Philippines Green Economy Partnership — funded by the European Union under its Global Gateway initiative and spearheaded by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

The partnership's Specific Objective 2 is to enhance circular economy practices by local government units in collaboration with the private sector and civil society, with a focus on youth and gender equality. It is co-led by the Department of the Interior and Local Government and implemented by UNDP Philippines.

The relevant mechanism is the Green LGUs Civil Society Grants for Circular Economy, whose Focus Area 1 is titled "Empowerment of the Informal Waste Sector and other GEDSI Groups through Capacity Building and Circular Economy Business Model Development." Its required components include mapping and identifying GEDSI groups and their challenges and enabling factors for meaningful inclusion, capacity and knowledge building, and circular economy business model development.

That is, almost word for word, what the workshop set out to do.

The grant's eligibility rules also explain the mix of participants. The call is open to community-based organisations, Indigenous Peoples' organisations, people's organisations, social movements, volunteer organisations, mass-based membership organisations, NGOs, non-governmental academic institutions, and youth groups — and it explicitly permits a lead CSO to partner with "other GEDSI-led CSOs/groups" on a joint proposal.

Cooperatives, notably, are ineligible to apply. That single rule shapes the kind of entity a workshop like this can help build, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving buried in a guidelines document.

Del Carmen's own context completes the picture. The municipality is described by AGREA as Siargao's only Green LGU, and it has been moving toward a circular economy through policy, practice, and what AGREA calls "permanent structural changes" — a 25 percent reduction in unmanaged waste over recent years, a mangrove reserve launched as a Ramsar Site in July 2026, community farms in every barangay, and enterprises converting coconut husk, agricultural waste, and ocean plastics into products.

A weaving workshop fits that portfolio. It is the craft-based expression of the same logic: material that would be discarded or exported raw, transformed locally into something with a price.

What the workshop does and does not establish

Two days is an input, and it should be described as one.

The workshop does not establish that participants have formed an enterprise, registered a brand, designed a packaging system, priced a product line, or secured a buyer. It does not establish that Mamanwa patterns are now protected, that younger weavers have been recruited, or that any association has adopted a GEDSI lens in its governance rather than in its vocabulary.

The specific outputs of the two days — which People's Organizations attended, how many participants there were, which partner institutions co-facilitated, which designs or packaging concepts were developed — were not published in the announcement, and this article does not reconstruct them.

It is also worth being honest about a structural limitation. A workshop on circular business models for GEDSI-led enterprises can clarify a pathway. It cannot supply the three things such enterprises most often lack: consistent working capital, a reliable buyer, and a governance structure that survives its founder.

What the workshop does establish is that a group of People's Organizations sat with Mamanwa artisans and worked on the commercial side of a craft tradition — packaging, branding, value addition, business model. That is a more uncomfortable conversation than a weaving demonstration, and it is the one that determines whether the craft pays.

What comes next

For the participating organizations, the next steps are specific and testable. Write down the cost of one finished piece — fibre, labour hours, consumables, transport — before setting a price. Test one packaging change, such as a label carrying fibre content, care instructions, and the name of the community that made the piece. Register the association's name and mark. Record who wove what, both for attribution and for quality control. Decide, in writing, how teaching by older weavers will be compensated.

For the Mamanwa artisans, the question is whether the session produced anything that makes their existing work easier to sell — a label, a photograph, a price, a contact. A workshop that leaves nothing in the hands is a workshop that has to be repeated.

For AGREA, iLAJA, and the Municipal Government of Del Carmen, the obligation is follow-through. A grant that runs to 2028 has time to support an enterprise past its first order, and that is the test that matters.

A note of appreciation

To the Mamanwa artisans who brought bamboo, rattan, and baliw into the room and demonstrated technique that predates every framework discussed around it, and to the People's Organizations and partner institutions who worked through the commercial questions with them: the fibre is renewable, the technique is inherited, and neither becomes a livelihood without the unglamorous work of pricing and packaging.

The patterns are the community's. What the workshop was trying to build is the business around them.

To learn more about the Para sa Isla Project and AGREA Foundation's work on circular economy livelihoods in Siargao, explore our official channels. Local government units, People's Organizations, and Indigenous Peoples' organizations interested in the Green LGUs Civil Society Grants can reach out through our contact page.