TAGUIG CITY(MindaNews / 16 August 2026) — There is something both encouraging and unsettling about listening to Mindanao’s small producers talk about what they need.
At the recent Mindanao Business Conference in Cagayan de Oro, MindaNews spoke with entrepreneurs making coconut-based wellness products in Misamis Occidental, plant-based personal-care products, furniture from discarded plastic in Tagoloan, scented candles, and even lettuce chips and lettuce ice cream from Bukidnon.
These are not people waiting for government to invent livelihoods for them.
They have already invented something.
What they are asking for comes afterward.
Wider markets. Better promotion. Equipment. Training. Certification. Financing. Connections to buyers. Help in scaling production.
And reading their concerns, I was struck by an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.
I have heard these questions before.
Not last year.
Thirty years ago.
We were already working on these problems
In the 1990s, when I was involved in chamber development in Mindanao, small and medium enterprise development was already part of the conversation.
We talked about access to credit.
Technology.
Productivity.
Training.
Market information.
Product development.
Trade fairs.
Buyer-seller matching.
Business counselling.
Linkages between small producers and larger enterprises.
Government-private sector cooperation.
Even then, the diagnosis was hardly a secret: Mindanao had no shortage of people who could grow, make, process or fabricate things. The difficulty was helping a small producer cross that long distance between having a product and having a sustainable enterprise.
The national government knew this, too.
The Magna Carta for Small Enterprises, enacted in 1991, already called for entrepreneurship and skills training, access to technology, financing, government procurement, less burdensome collateral requirements, linkages between large and small enterprises, and common service facilities.
Think about that.
1991.
We have therefore spent more than three decades designing programs to solve problems that entrepreneurs are still describing in 2026.
That deserves more than another seminar.
It deserves a question.
Why are we still starting over?
To be fair, we have not been standing still
It would be unfair—and historically inaccurate—to suggest that government and the private sector have done nothing.
Quite the opposite.
Over the years we created institutions and programs addressing almost every item on the MSME wish list.
We established Negosyo Centers so entrepreneurs could obtain business information, advisory services and referrals closer to home.
We developed One Town, One Product, or OTOP, to help communities turn local resources and skills into competitive products.
We created Shared Service Facilities so smaller businesses that could not afford expensive machinery individually could gain access to equipment collectively.
There have been DOST technology programs, DA interventions, financing windows, cooperative programs, chamber projects, LGU livelihood initiatives, export-development programs, packaging assistance, trade missions, business matching, fairs and exhibitions.
Later came digital platforms, e-commerce training and virtual trade fairs.
OTOP itself eventually evolved beyond the original town-product concept toward product development, packaging, standards, market access and financing.
In other words, many of the solutions we instinctively propose today have already been tried.
A one-stop shop?
We have Negosyo Centers.
Common production equipment?
We have Shared Service Facilities.
Product-to-market assistance?
We have OTOP and numerous DTI programs.
Digital marketplaces?
Several have come and gone or continue in different forms.
Buyer matching?
We have been organizing it for decades.
Which changes the question entirely.
The challenge is no longer simply:
What program are we missing?
It is:
Why have all these programs not yet become one dependable journey for the entrepreneur?
Government sees programs. The entrepreneur sees doors.
Perhaps part of the answer is hidden in how institutions work.
Government naturally organizes itself according to mandates.
One agency handles trade.
Another technology.
Another agriculture.
Another science.
Another financing.
Another certification.
Another local development.
Each may be doing its job.
On an organizational chart, this looks like an ecosystem.
But stand outside that chart as a small producer in Bukidnon.
You have developed lettuce chips.
Now what?
Where do you go for shelf-life testing?
Who improves the packaging?
Who helps with FDA requirements?
Where do you obtain equipment?
Who finances the equipment?
Who introduces you to supermarkets?
Who teaches you the economics of supplying them?
What happens when a buyer orders ten times your present production capacity?
Who helps with logistics?
And who stays with you after all those referrals?
From inside government, there may be ten programs available.
From outside government, there may simply be ten doors.
The entrepreneur is left to become his own government navigator.
We may have confused assistance with development
There is another possibility.
Government programs understandably count what can be counted.
People trained.
MSMEs assisted.
Trade fairs conducted.
Products displayed.
Loans released.
Shared facilities established.
Participants attending seminars.
Sales generated during exhibitions.
These are legitimate measures of activity.
But they do not answer the question that matters most:
Did the enterprise grow?
Suppose we assisted a Bukidnon food processor in 2026.
I would like somebody to ask in 2031:
Is the company still operating?
How much was it selling then and how much is it selling now?
How many people did it employ?
Did it obtain certification?
Did it enter supermarkets?
Did it become a supplier to hotels or restaurants?
Did it export?
Did it borrow successfully—and repay?
Did its farmers earn more?
Did it remain micro, become small, or graduate into a medium enterprise?
Or did it attend three seminars, appear in two trade fairs, receive a certificate of participation—and quietly disappear?
There is a world of difference between an MSME assisted and an enterprise transformed.
We should start measuring the second.
The machine may already exist
The Shared Service Facilities program provides an especially useful example.
When a small producer says, “We need equipment,” our instinct may be to propose another common service facility.
But we already have them.
So the first question should no longer be:
What equipment should government buy?
It should be:
Where is the equipment we already bought?
Is the nearest Shared Service Facility operating?
Who manages it?
What is its utilization rate?
Can entrepreneurs outside the original beneficiary organization use it?
Is the machinery still appropriate?
Is it maintained?
Does the producer even know it exists?
If the facility is 40 kilometers away, inaccessible by public transport and available only three mornings a week, then technically the service exists.
Economically, it may not.
That distinction—between availability on a government inventory and accessibility to an entrepreneur—deserves much more attention.
And please, not another website
Digitalization presents another temptation.
Every few years, somebody proposes an online marketplace for MSMEs.
It sounds modern.
Upload the products.
Create profiles.
Put everything online.
Launch the website.
Take photographs.
Issue a press release.
Then wait for buyers.
We have had versions of this already.
The lesson should be obvious by now:
Small producers do not need another marketplace nearly as much as they need a market.
Those are different things.
A website containing 5,000 products is not market access if nobody with purchasing power is looking at it.
What Mindanao needs is not necessarily another e-commerce platform.
It needs buyer density.
Imagine instead a permanent network connecting qualified Mindanao producers with supermarket chains, hotels, resorts, restaurants, airlines, hospitals, schools, institutional food buyers, exporters, government procurement offices and large corporations.
Then measure not how many products were uploaded.
Measure:
Purchase orders generated.
Repeat orders received.
Value of contracts signed.
Enterprises entering formal supply chains.
That is market development.
The missing institution may not be another institution
This brings me to what I now think is the central problem.
Mindanao does not necessarily need another MSME agency.
We have enough acronyms.
Nor do we necessarily need another one-stop shop.
We already built versions of those.
What we have failed to institutionalize sufficiently is continuity.
A small enterprise should be able to enter the development system through almost any door—a Negosyo Center, chamber of commerce, LGU, cooperative, DTI office, DOST office, DA program or MinDA initiative.
But once it enters, somebody should know where that enterprise is trying to go.
Imagine a persistent enterprise development record.
Not another form to satisfy government.
A roadmap for the business.
Diagnosis → product development → testing → certification → financing → equipment → production → buyer matching → purchase order → delivery → repeat order → expansion.
The agencies do not have to merge.
Their databases do not have to become one giant bureaucracy.
But the entrepreneur’s journey should become visible across them.
And somewhere in that system should be one person with a wonderfully unfashionable responsibility:
Stay with the enterprise.
Call that person a business counselor, enterprise account manager or case manager.
The title hardly matters.
The continuity does.
If an entrepreneur is referred from DTI to DOST, somebody follows up.
If certification stalls, somebody asks why.
If financing is rejected, somebody determines what is missing.
If a supermarket expresses interest but the producer lacks capacity, somebody connects the purchase order to financing and production assistance.
Not forever.
Just long enough for the business to learn to walk without government holding its hand.
The graveyard of good projects
Those of us who have worked around development programs long enough know another uncomfortable truth.
Sometimes the problem is not that an intervention failed.
Sometimes it worked.
Then the project ended.
Funding expired.
The donor left.
The project director moved.
The consultant’s contract finished.
A governor completed his term.
A mayor lost an election.
A secretary was replaced.
A chamber elected new officers.
A new administration arrived with a new program carrying a new acronym.
And somewhere in a municipality, the entrepreneur remained.
This may be one of the great unmeasured costs of Philippine development:
institutional amnesia.
We repeatedly rediscover problems that previous generations already diagnosed.
Then we design new programs resembling programs implemented ten or twenty years earlier.
We call them innovations.
Launch them.
Photograph them.
And begin again.
The small producer does not have that luxury.
Her payroll arrives every Friday.
From projects to plumbing
Perhaps this is the change in thinking we need.
Enterprise development should become less like a succession of projects and more like plumbing.
Nobody launches the water system every three years.
Nobody holds a ribbon-cutting ceremony every morning before turning on the faucet.
The infrastructure simply exists.
Reliable.
Boring.
Available when needed.
That is what basic enterprise support should eventually become.
Need product testing? There is a known route.
Need halal certification? There is a known route.
Need packaging assistance? Known route.
Need equipment? Known route.
Need working capital for a confirmed purchase order? Known route.
Need an institutional buyer? Known route.
The extraordinary thing would not be receiving assistance.
The extraordinary thing would be falling through the cracks.
And this is where the chambers matter
There may be a special role here for Mindanao’s chambers of commerce.
Government agencies deliver programs.
But chambers live much closer to the life cycle of businesses.
They hear the complaints after government consultations have ended.
They know which permits take six months instead of six weeks.
They know when an expensive machine sits unused.
They know which financing program looks excellent in a brochure but proves nearly impossible for a microenterprise to access.
And they know when a government intervention actually works.
That makes chambers potentially valuable not merely as advocates but as keepers of institutional memory.
At every Mindanao Business Conference, we pass resolutions.
Perhaps we should also bring back the old ones.
Put them on the screen.
Requested in 1996.
What happened?
Requested in 2006.
What happened?
Requested in 2016.
What happened?
Requested in 2026.
Who owns it?
What is the deadline?
And at the next conference:
Done, partly done, stalled—or forgotten?
That may be more valuable than adding another ten resolutions to the pile.
One question five years later
There is an even simpler accountability mechanism.
Take the small producers featured at this year’s conference.
Remember their names.
Remember their businesses.
Remember what they asked for.
Then find them again in 2031.
Ask:
Where are you now?
That single question might tell us more about the effectiveness of MSME policy than a hundred pages of accomplishment reports.
Because ultimately the purpose of enterprise development is not to create beneficiaries.
It is to create enterprises that eventually no longer need to be beneficiaries.
Businesses that employ people.
Buy from farmers.
Pay taxes.
Enter supply chains.
Create brands.
Export products.
Survive recessions.
Pass from parents to children.
And perhaps someday become the large company helping the next small producer enter the market.
Thirty years of helping
So I would not say Mindanao has neglected its small producers.
That would be unfair to the many public servants, chambers, development organizations, cooperatives, universities, donors and entrepreneurs who have spent decades building programs and institutions.
We have helped.
A great deal.
The harder question is whether we have learned enough from all that helping.
Because if a coconut processor in Misamis Occidental, a young farmer in Bukidnon and a manufacturer in Tagoloan are still asking in 2026 for many of the things their predecessors asked for in the 1990s, perhaps the problem is no longer lack of ideas.
Perhaps it is our habit of treating enterprise development as a collection of interventions instead of a continuing journey.
Thirty years ago, we asked: What assistance do small producers need?
Today we should be asking something harder:
Of all the producers we assisted, what happened to them?
And if we cannot answer that question, perhaps we have discovered the real gap in Mindanao enterprise development.
Not another program.
Not another platform.
Not another acronym.
Memory. Continuity. Follow-through.
The small entrepreneur should not have to start from the beginning every time government does.
Neither should Mindanao.
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. South of the 8th Parallel is a reflective civic column written from the vantage point of a Mindanao-born senior who has lived the arc from Ozamiz to Cotabato, Davao, Manila, Cagayan de Oro, and now Taguig. The 8th Parallel North is the line of latitude eight degrees above the Equator that runs across Mindanao, placing the island firmly in the tropical belt and slightly removed from the country’s political center. Rooted in memory yet attentive to policy, this Sunday column examines Mindanao’s concerns—governance, development, peace, inequality, migration, faith, and aging—with the steadiness of lived experience. This is not a view from the capital looking south, but a life shaped by the South looking outward, seeking perspective over noise and endurance over spectacle. Agbon also writes a Wednesday column, “What Now, Wednesday.” For more of his writings, please subscribe to https://marrizagbon.substack.com/)
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