The Women of Barangay Bineng Already Knew the Problems. A Design Thinking Workshop Gave Them the Tools to Build the Solutions.

The women of Barangay Bineng did not come to a startup workshop to learn about entrepreneurship as an abstract concept. They came with problems they already knew: waste building up in their community, water access that could be stronger, vegetables grown locally but not fully utilized, cacao with untapped potential, and plastic pollution with no structured solution. On May 7, 2026, they were given a framework to turn those problems into ideas. They used it well.

The activity was part of Project ACCESS: Awareness Campaign for Cybersecurity, eGov, Startup, and Skills, led by the Department of Information and Communications Technology Cordillera Administrative Region. The session focused on the Startup track, framing entrepreneurship as a pathway toward purpose-driven community development rather than individual wealth creation. It was organized in partnership with Barangay Bineng, in cooperation with the local women's organization and with support from PHINMA University of Pangasinan On-the-Job Trainees.

Design Thinking at the Barangay Level

The workshop structured participation around the Design Thinking methodology: identify the community challenge, understand the people affected by it, ideate solutions grounded in available local resources, and develop a concept clear enough to present and defend.

Participants were grouped into five teams. Each team worked through the process collaboratively, moving from problem identification to solution development to a live pitch in the Pitch That Idea Series, a pitching-for-learning platform of the ICT Industry Development Bureau Cordillera Administrative Region. The format was not competitive in the traditional sense. It was a structured exercise in articulating an idea clearly enough that others could understand, evaluate, and eventually build on it.

The Five Ideas They Pitched

What emerged from the workshop was not five generic proposals. It was five ideas built directly from the specific conditions and resources of Barangay Bineng.

BinEnGtiliZeR addressed the community's biodegradable waste by proposing a system to convert organic material into fertilizer — improving soil health, increasing crop yields, and reducing waste simultaneously. The concept connects two problems into one solution: waste management and agricultural productivity.

REFILL AND REINFORCE tackled water access, proposing a community-centered initiative built around refill stations, water conservation awareness, and sustainable water management systems for households. Clean, safe, potable water is not a given in every part of the Cordillera, and the team designed their concept around the specific household-level reality of Barangay Bineng.

VEGGIE NAY'S took locally grown vegetables and reimagined them as healthy, affordable snack products — creating a value-adding food processing opportunity that generates livelihood for both farmers and women in the community while promoting better nutrition. The concept follows the same logic proven by food innovators across Northern Luzon: local crop, underutilized, processed into something the market will buy.

BINENG CACAO proposed cacao-based products positioned around the tagline "Your Chocolate, Your Wellness" — antioxidant-rich products that support health while creating value-adding opportunities for local cacao farmers. La Trinidad and the surrounding Benguet municipalities sit within a broader Cordilleran cacao belt that is gaining increasing attention from the agri-food industry.

PLASTIC TRANSFORMATION proposed repurposing plastic waste into functional community products — reducing pollution, promoting environmental awareness, and advancing sustainable waste management in a community where plastic disposal is an ongoing challenge.

What This Workshop Actually Did

Design thinking workshops at the community level are only as valuable as the quality of ideas they surface and the follow-through infrastructure that exists to support the best ones. What DICT-CAR and the Pitch That Idea Series created on May 7 was not just a learning activity. It was a structured first step: taking women who have never been in a startup room before, giving them the tools to think like problem-solvers, and asking them to stand up and defend their ideas in front of others.

That experience — of articulating a problem clearly, building a solution around local resources, and presenting it with confidence — does not disappear after the workshop ends. It changes how participants see their own community challenges. Problems become briefs. Resources become inputs. And women who came in as community members leave as potential founders.

Whether any of the five ideas becomes a running enterprise will depend on what access to mentorship, funding, and market linkage becomes available to the teams in the months ahead. But the ideas are real, the problems are real, and the women behind them are now equipped with a framework they did not have before May 7.

Source: DICT-CAR | ICT Industry Development Bureau Cordillera Administrative Region | Project ACCESS | Barangay Bineng, La Trinidad, Benguet | May 7, 2026