Growing Peace
Through Enterprise

Commissioned by the Department of Trade and Industry under the RAPID Growth Project (DTI-IFAD), Peace Crops developed a provincial brand governance and quality integrity framework for specialty and commercial coffee in Bukidnon — the framework that will govern the Bukidnon Bean identity in domestic and international markets.

The engagement translated international trade standards and national product regulations into a rules-based manual governing brand eligibility, quality parameters, lot-based verification procedures, and enforcement safeguards. The resulting governance instrument uses binary eligibility decision rules designed for practical LGU and cooperative implementation — so that frontline actors, not just technical officers, can apply the framework.

Rather than imposing standards from above, Peace Crops anchored the methodology in the actual realities of Bukidnon farmers and processors — working upward through a staged, multi-stakeholder validation process involving coffee farmer associations, processors, and DTI officials to build standards that were both technically sound and operationally feasible. The result is a compliance review matrix and quality flowchart that allows any eligible actor in the chain to assess their own status and verify the Bukidnon Bean brand from farm to finished product.

The manual includes a compliance review matrix and quality flowchart — key tools that allow cooperatives and LGUs to assess eligibility and verify compliance at each node of the value chain, from farm to finished product.

Funded by the Global Green Growth Institute through the BIMP-EAGA-Republic of Korea Cooperation Fund, this project addressed the deep economic disparity and high poverty incidence in Butig, Lanao del Sur — a predominantly farming community still overcoming its past as a haven for violent extremism.

The project implemented agroenterprise and farm tourism development initiatives as catalysts for revitalizing Butig's future as a thriving agro-ecotourism growth center in the BARMM region. By leveraging the municipality's rich agricultural resources and cultural heritage, the initiative created sustainable livelihood opportunities and promoted inclusive economic growth.

Through the convergence of stakeholders, strategic partnerships, and capacity-building activities, the project worked to transform Butig into a vibrant, prosperous community — unlocking its full potential as an emerging agro-ecotourism destination and providing a replicable model for other conflict-affected GIDA communities across Mindanao.

Butig is a place of quiet, extraordinary beauty — watched over by the iconic Sleeping Lady mountain range whose silhouette has defined the horizon here for as long as anyone can remember, and fed by the Malaig River, which winds through the municipality before emptying into Lake Lanao. These are not just scenic features; they are the lifeblood of the farms and communities that the GGGI-BKCF project set out to transform. The Maranao communities of Butig carry a living cultural heritage — in their weaving, their architecture, their music, and their generations-deep relationship with this particular land. The project recognized that this beauty and this heritage were not just backdrops to development — they were the development itself, waiting to be organized, valued, and shared with the world. To tell that story in full — the landscapes, the farmers, the heritage, the vision for what Butig is becoming — visit butigbeyondbeauty.com.

Funded by the Bank of America through the Education Development Center (EDC) of USAID, this project promoted the building of a blue-green economy in Cagayan de Oro City through the introduction of Black Soldier Fly (BSF) technology as a circular economy solution.

Peace Crops administered the capacity building component, training out-of-school youths, students under the Alternative Learning System, and members of the Sangguniang Kabataan in Barangay Tablon in BSF production. The Black Soldier Fly provides a dual solution: an alternative protein source for the feed industry and an organic waste conversion system producing compost and soil conditioners.

The project also engaged students of the School of Business Management of Xavier University through its National Service Training Program, who assisted the community youth in developing data-driven activities in production, marketing, and financial literacy — linking campus expertise to community enterprise.

Peace Crops prepared the Local Government Unit of Gingoog City for the eventual rollout of the Community-Based Monitoring System (CBMS), capacitating LGU officers, staff, and barangay-level survey enumerators across all 79 barangays of the city.

The project employed the Bridging Leadership (BL) Framework in a series of workshops focused on the importance of owning, co-owning, and co-creating collaborative solutions to address persistent poverty — the gnawing social divide that CBMS data is designed to expose and address. A mock survey was performed by 160 enumerators using a KoBoToolbox form specially designed for this engagement.

The intervention evolved into a second phase: translating collected data into interactive dashboards to inform evidence-based planning and supervision by city departments. The dashboards — publicly accessible at gingoog.gov.ph — represent one of the more concrete digitization outputs Peace Crops has produced for a local government, demonstrating that data collection without visualization is only half the work.

This is where Peace Crops began. In 2017, the US Embassy Philippines recognized Peace Crops as a Special Project Awardee for conflict response and peacebuilding, providing ₱1 million to address one of the root causes of violent extremism in communities still reeling from the Marawi siege: economic exclusion.

The project was conceived to reduce the appeal of terrorism by addressing the socioeconomic pressures present among the most vulnerable youth in Lanao del Sur. Anchored on agroenterprise productivity, Peace Crops began training 15 out-of-school youth — young people who had no clear economic pathway and who were at risk of radicalization in the post-siege environment.

By project end in 2019, the initiative had grown to 108 members of youth, women, and local farmers, while establishing strong ties with local and provincial government leaders, the military, DA Region 10, and market linkages with a fast-food chain, a hotel, and municipal-based markets in the province.

The project earned international recognition: in September 2019, Peace Crops was hailed SDG #2 (Zero Hunger) Mindanao Champion at the Project 2030: Leaders Unite After Hours event in Chicago. That same year, it won the Premio CEMEX-TEC Global Community Entrepreneurship Award in Monterrey, Mexico — the only non-Latin American organization awardee in that category. In February 2020, it was named one of the Ten Accomplished Youth Organizations (TAYO) in the Philippines.

This project is the foundation of everything Peace Crops has become.

Peace Crops was commissioned by the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) Region 10 to produce a comprehensive documentation series of best practices across four flagship national programs: the Sagana at Ligtas na Tubig sa Lahat (SALINTUBIG) Program, Bottom-up Budgeting (BuB), Support to Barangay Development Program (SBDP), and the Congressional Matching Grant for Provinces (CMGP).

The SALINTUBIG documentation — the larger of the two engagements — covered nine municipalities across the provinces of Misamis Occidental, Misamis Oriental, Lanao del Norte, and Camiguin in Region 10. The team conducted field documentation across all sites, gathering testimonies from community beneficiaries, local government officials, and program implementors to capture the human story behind each water access intervention.

DILG subsequently re-commissioned Peace Crops for a second documentation engagement covering three additional municipalities in Region 10, this time focused on disaster risk management infrastructure, peace-building roads, and community transformation projects. Both engagements required rigorous field coverage, community interview facilitation, and post-production of multi-format communication materials.

The outputs serve as institutional memory and knowledge products for DILG Region 10, communicating program impact to national government, donors, and communities in accessible, shareable formats.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, UN IOM commissioned Peace Crops to implement a Risk Communications and Community Engagement (RCCE) intervention in the municipality of Talakag, Bukidnon — a community where standard Filipino or English health messaging had limited reach among the Indigenous Peoples (IP) population.

Peace Crops anchored the entire campaign on Higaonon, the indigenous language spoken by the IP communities of Talakag, recognizing that effective health communication must begin in the language and worldview of the people it aims to reach. The intervention covered four barangays: Lantud, Indulang, San Rafael, and Tikalaan, all of which easily embraced the culturally resonant messaging.

Central to the project was a deep engagement with IP rituals, beliefs, and social structures around health and illness. The team worked with community elders and leaders to understand how COVID-19 mapped onto existing Higaonon frameworks for community safety and collective responsibility, weaving these cultural anchors into the campaign materials rather than imposing external frameworks.

The project was well-received by the Municipality of Talakag, arriving at a critical period of intermittent COVID case spikes in the area. The resulting communication materials — produced in Higaonon — were deployed across multiple media formats to maximize community reach.

In 2022, the project's narrative was recognized internationally when it was selected for presentation at the Asia Regional Exchange Forum on WASH Resilience and Sustainability in Kathmandu, Nepal, sponsored by the German WASH Network, UNICEF, and GIZ — highlighting Peace Crops' peace-humanitarian-development nexus approach.

Under the DTI-IFAD RAPID Growth Project, Peace Crops synthesized a comprehensive Detailed Investment Plan (DIP) for the coconut sector of Region 11 — one of the Philippines' most critical coconut-producing corridors.

The DIP integrated enterprise diagnostic findings and IFAD-approved business plans from 20 farmer organizations across all Davao provinces into a unified industry and market analysis. The plan maps soft and hard intervention requirements across the entire value chain: from coconut production and post-harvest handling through to processing, market linkages, and institutional development.

A dedicated chapter on gender and indigenous peoples analysis ensures that investment priorities reflect the social inclusion standards required by IFAD, recognizing the critical roles of women and IP communities in the coconut value chain. The plan serves as the strategic investment guide for the coconut sector across Davao de Oro, Davao del Sur, Davao del Norte, Davao Oriental, and Davao Occidental.

In collaboration with Smart PLDT's PlantSmart Grow Hub Project — a nationwide corporate sustainability initiative — Peace Crops was tapped to lead the greening of an idle roofdeck at the PLDT Building in Barangay Carmen, Cagayan de Oro City.

PLDT office employees were trained in the basics of urban rooftop gardening, combining Peace Crops' agroenterprise expertise with Smart PLDT's corporate social responsibility platform. The initiative represents what can be considered a pioneering green economy output for the city — demonstrating that productive agriculture is possible even in urban corporate spaces.

The project was formally launched as a grand opening event with both Smart PLDT national representatives and local CDO stakeholders, positioning the collaboration as a model for other corporate campuses in the region.

Peace Crops' Executive Director was engaged by UN Habitat as End-of-Project National Evaluator for the project "Rebuilding Marawi, Republic of the Philippines, through Community-Driven Shelter and Livelihood Recovery Support" — a permanent shelter project funded by the Government of Japan.

The evaluation served two primary purposes: (i) to provide evidence of results and meet accountability requirements for the funding government and UN system, and (ii) to promote operational improvement, learning, and knowledge sharing across co-implementing partners including UN Environment, UNDP, Task Force Bangon Marawi, the Social Housing Finance Corporation (SHFC), and local partners.

The engagement required navigating a complex, multi-agency implementation environment while maintaining evaluative independence — synthesizing community-level outcomes from permanent shelter beneficiaries with institutional findings across the broader Marawi recovery ecosystem. The evaluation drew on field interviews with displaced families, housing beneficiaries, government officials, and UN staff across the conflict-affected areas.

USAID-Plan International's Marawi Response Project (MRP) sought to apply the value chain approach to drive economic growth and poverty reduction among internally displaced persons (IDPs) and small farming communities — integrating micro and small enterprises (MSEs) into increasingly competitive value chains.

Peace Crops conducted the value chain research for the project, analyzing the structures, systems, and relationships that define the key value chains relevant to Marawi-area MSEs. The research identified how MSEs — including small-scale farmers — could improve or upgrade their products and processes, and where they could benefit most from interventions that strengthen value chain competitiveness.

This engagement was one of Peace Crops' earliest formal research commissions from the international development sector, establishing the organization's methodological credibility in value chain analysis for post-conflict economic recovery settings.

Peace Crops facilitated strategic planning for the local government officers of the Municipality of Butig and cultural enterprise planning for its youth arm, the Sangguniang Kabataan. The goal was to reinvent this geographically isolated area (GIDA) as an emergent model for a sustainable agro-ecotourism destination in Lanao del Sur, Mindanao — overcoming its conflict-laden past.

The planning process used participatory facilitation methods to help Butig's leadership articulate a coherent municipal vision and actionable strategies that were both culturally grounded and development-oriented. The SK component specifically focused on cultural enterprise as a pathway for youth engagement and income generation — positioning Butig's indigenous heritage as a development asset.

This engagement was the precursor to the larger GGGI/BKCF agroenterprise and farm tourism project, establishing the strategic foundation and stakeholder alignment that later interventions would build upon.

This partnership with the Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) institutionalized collaborative efforts between the university's Integrated Ateneo Formation (InAF) program and Peace Crops, utilizing respective resources and capacities to deliver outreach services to identified communities within Peace Crops' geographic scope.

ADMU's NSTP12-Bigkis program — designed for third-year college students from disciplines including Social Science, Economics, Computer Science, IT Management, Fine Arts, and Development Studies — provided students with opportunities to respond to the needs of marginalized communities through service-learning research and projects. Peace Crops provided mentorship and facilitation to connect students to the communities.

Semester 1 outputs demonstrated the range of multi-disciplinary student engagement: a farmer profiling app for Butig, a coffee production app with RAPID Growth partners, logo design for product labels and Butig's tourism rebranding, a Facebook marketing page for a Bukidnon coffee association, and a Youth Leadership Training for SK Butig on cultural enterprise.

Picong sits at the southern end of Lanao del Sur, where the province meets the Celebes Sea — a coastal municipality as far from the provincial capital as you can get, and one whose daily life is shaped as much by fishing and tides as by farming. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 arrived here alongside a quiet municipal resolve to keep building. At the invitation of the Municipal Planning and Development Office (MPDO) of LGU Picong, Peace Crops introduced agroenterprise to a cohort of 12 young farmers, establishing a demonstration farm as both training ground and living proof that productive agriculture was possible even in uncertain times.

The demo farm quickly became more than a training site. When Commander Bravo — whose name carries real weight in Lanao del Sur's layered security landscape — visited the farm, it sent a signal that reached beyond agriculture: this work was seen, it was recognized, and peace in this town could be cultivated from the soil up, not just enforced from above.

Peace Crops widened the circle beyond the farm. A coastal clean-up drive drew nearly 30 young men and women from the community — a tangible act of stewardship in a town whose identity is bound to the lakeshore. In a town that faces the Celebes Sea, cleaning the shore isn't just environmental work — it is a declaration that this place is worth protecting, that these young people belong to it and it to them.

The year-long engagement concluded with an all-barangay agricultural resource survey — a comprehensive mapping of Picong's farming assets conducted for municipal planning purposes. What began as a youth agroenterprise program ended as something more durable: a community that had looked at itself honestly, documented what it had, and was ready to plan from a place of knowledge rather than assumption.

Under the DTI-IFAD RAPID Growth Project, Peace Crops developed IFAD-approved business plans for eight coffee and five cacao agroenterprise units in Bukidnon, grounded in participatory enterprise diagnostics with farmer association officers and members.

The coffee association plans were among the first approved across eight regions in Visayas and Mindanao — a testament to the rigor of Peace Crops' enterprise development methodology. The engagement strengthened thirteen farmer organizations' capacity to articulate business strategies and investment requirements meeting international development finance standards.

Each business plan was built through a participatory process — farm-level data collection, enterprise diagnostic workshops, financial modeling, and multi-stage validation — ensuring that the resulting documents were owned by the farmer associations themselves, not merely produced for them.