19/09/2026
IWS ENGAGES VISAYAS PARTNERS ON GENDERED FOOD SYSTEMS TRANSFORMATION THROUGH AGROECOLOGY
From 16–18 September 2026, the Institute of Women’s Studies (IWS), St. Scholastica’s College–Manila, joined Fastenaktion partner organizations in the Visayas for a three-day learning engagement on Engendering Food Systems Transformation through Agroecology, held at the Good Shepherd Training and Spirituality Center.
The engagement brought together participants from CERD Bantayan Bay, FSPIF, GSSP, SAC San Carlos, and CAFE-I, together with Bembet Madrid and staff of the Fastenaktion Philippine Coordinating Unit (PCU). Their diverse experiences in community organizing, food systems, agriculture and fisheries, gender justice, livelihoods, ecological work, and organizational accompaniment grounded the learning in the realities of communities across the Visayas.
The three days unfolded through a deliberate learning journey:
BASA AT HANDA → DANAS → HABI AT TINDIG
Day 1, facilitated by Keeshia Austria, Jemadel Gallardo, and Frederick P. Pablico, established a shared language for understanding food systems, gender, agroecology, power, resilience, and transformation. Participants explored how food systems extend far beyond production to include food access, labor and care, decision-making, markets, ecological conditions, institutions, governance, and the unequal burdens that may be carried by women and other marginalized groups.
Day 2 brought the learning into field inquiry and lived experience. Participants examined how household food security, agroecological practices, livelihoods, women’s leadership, institutional support, ecological conditions, resource access, and everyday strategies of coping and resilience intersect in actual community settings.
Day 3 brought the field cases back into collective analysis. Participants compared evidence, surfaced recurring patterns and meaningful differences, identified binding conditions, and translated these into organizational directions for action. The engagement culminated in action planning facilitated by Nay Aida, supporting each organization in moving from analysis toward concrete responsibilities, support needs, timelines, and visible evidence of improvement.
Throughout the engagement, the synthesis also drew from developing IWS analytical lenses that helped deepen the questions emerging from the participants’ own cases.
HABI invited a closer reading of the relationships that make a food system work—or fail to work: what is carried, where things flow, what forces shape the system, where resources or responsibility leak, what provides support, what evidence remains, whose knowledge counts, and who ultimately answers for the consequences.
BINHALON widened the reading toward the socio-ecological relationships across BINHI, HA(NGIN), and ALON—land, atmosphere, and water/coastal systems—and how these connect with food, livelihood, people, institutions, and power. It reminded us that ecological relationships must be examined rather than simply assumed, and that gains in one part of a system should not obscure burdens or losses transferred elsewhere.
BANTAYOG brought another critical question into the conversation: when mechanisms of care, support, safeguarding, referral, or institutional responsibility are present, are they actually accessible, activated, and functioning? The existence of a mechanism does not automatically mean that people can use it or that it works when needed.
From this emerged an equally important concern: TATAG-KALINGA — katatagan na may kalinga.
Resilience cannot simply mean expecting people to endure one more crisis, absorb another responsibility, or keep a community or organization functioning despite exhaustion. Food-system transformation must also ask:
Who cares for those who are carrying the work?
Caring for carers means making space for psychosocial support, rest and recovery, supervision and debriefing, referral, reasonable workloads, backup and continuity arrangements, and organizational responsibility for wellbeing. This is especially important for women, community organizers, farmers, fisherfolk, volunteers, and local leaders who may simultaneously carry productive work, care work, organizational responsibilities, and crisis response.
Resilience built on exhaustion is not transformation.
Taken together, these developing readings increasingly opened toward NEXUS—not by collapsing HABI, BINHALON, BANTAYOG, and TATAG-KALINGA into one framework, but by asking how distinct systems, actors, forms of knowledge, resources, care, and responsibilities meet and are handed from one to another across humanitarian, development, and peace-related concerns.
The questions therefore became deeper than simply asking whether programs or activities exist:
Who carries the work?
Who decides?
Who benefits?
Who absorbs the risks and costs?
Who cares for those carrying the system?
What support is present—and what support actually functions?
What gets lost when responsibility passes from one actor to another?
Can someone step back, rest, or ask for help without the whole system collapsing?
And who remains accountable when projects and activities end?
Across the three days, several lessons became increasingly clear:
Training delivered is not yet transformation.
Seeds distributed are not yet transformation.
Participation is not yet empowerment.
Presence of support is not the same as functioning support.
And resilience should not depend on the endless labor and endurance of the same people.
What matters is what happens afterward: whether learning is taken up, whether practices change, whether unequal burdens are reduced or more fairly shared, whether ecological relationships are restored rather than merely described, whether support systems continue to function, whether organizations can sustain the work, and whether improvements become visible in people’s food, livelihoods, relationships, wellbeing, and environment.
The active participation of Ms. Bembet Madrid and the Fastenaktion PCU staff also situated this Visayas engagement within a longer learning journey.
Reflecting on the process, Ms. Madrid noted how much the training has evolved from its earlier iteration with YAPAK, through the Mindanao engagement, and now through the experience in the Visayas. She also recognized its potential to be further refined and replicated in Luzon, again in Mindanao, in other partner settings, and potentially with external collaborators.
This reflection captures something important about the process itself: the training is not being treated as a fixed package.
It continues to evolve through each field experience, each partner conversation, each community encounter, participant feedback, emerging evidence, and the questions that previous iterations could not yet answer.
From YAPAK to Mindanao to Visayas, the weave continues to deepen.
And within that weave, HABI, BINHALON, BANTAYOG, and TATAG-KALINGA are increasingly being brought into conversation as distinct but complementary lenses, opening toward NEXUS and a deeper understanding of what food-system transformation requires.
For IWS, the task is therefore not merely to replicate a training. It is to continue learning how the engagement can become more grounded, more gender-transformative, more ecologically responsive, more attentive to care and wellbeing, and more accountable to the communities and organizations carrying food-system transformation forward.
Our gratitude to Fastenaktion and its Philippine Coordinating Unit; Ms. Bembet Madrid; Nay Aida; CERD Bantayan Bay; FSPIF; GSSP; SAC San Carlos; CAFE-I; the participating community members and facilitators; and the Good Shepherd Training and Spirituality Center for creating a space for shared learning, questioning, reflection, care, and action.
The weave continues—not simply toward more activities, but toward transformation that can be seen, sustained, cared for, and accounted for.
