Small business, big region

I spent yesterday at the Likhang Filipino Exhibition Hall in Pasay, seated as a panelist at the ASEAN MSME Summit where around 400 trade officials, business leaders and entrepreneurs from across the region gathered under the theme “Navigating the Future Together: Building Future-ready ASEAN MSMEs.” Summits like this can be theater. This one, I want to argue, is something more, because it sits on top of real machinery that the Department of Trade and Industry has been quietly building.

Start with what DTI under Secretary Cris Roque has actually done, not just announced. The department has taken the trade fair, long dismissed as a ribbon cutting exercise, and turned it into an industrial policy tool. There is now a dedicated expo for nearly every sector where Filipinos excel: the National Food Fair, the first ever DTI Beauty Fair, the Malikhaing Pinoy Creative Expo and more. These are not vanity events. They are matchmaking venues where a chili paste maker from Bicol meets a supermarket buyer, where an animator meets a studio.

Then there is money, the perennial complaint of every Filipino entrepreneur. Through the Small Business Corporation, DTI’s own lending arm, an MSME can now borrow up to P5 million with no collateral required and, as Secretary Roque herself told the summit, with a full year of grace on both interest and principal. New facilities like Purchase Order financing, which lets a business borrow against a confirmed order rather than against land it does not own, and Enterprise Rehabilitation Financing were introduced to make SB Corp. genuinely accessible. For a founder with a signed contract but an empty bank account, that is the difference between growing and merely surviving.

And crucially, DTI is thinking beyond our shores. The plan to build SME hubs through the Philippine Trade and Investment Centers, working closely with our embassies worldwide, means our commercial attachés become salesmen for Filipino products, not just report writers. Every attaché in Tokyo, Dubai or Los Angeles should wake up asking one question: which Filipino company can I help land a customer today? If that culture takes hold, it changes everything for a small exporter who cannot afford a foreign sales office.

Now, the honest part. None of this matters if it does not scale. Too many entrepreneurs in the provinces still do not know SB Corp. exists. Too many still find the paperwork of exporting more terrifying than the competition. Government programs in this country have a habit of being excellent in Manila and invisible in Mindanao. The test of Secretary Roque’s DTI is not the launch, it is the last mile.

Which brings me to ASEAN, and why this summit matters beyond the photo opportunities. The numbers are staggering: about 70 million MSMEs make up 97 to 99 percent of all establishments in ASEAN, employ 85 percent of the regional workforce and produce roughly 45 percent of its GDP. Southeast Asia is not an economy of conglomerates. It is an economy of sari-sari stores, food stalls, workshops and startups. Whoever designs the region’s rules for small business designs the region’s future.

For Filipino MSMEs, ASEAN integration cuts both ways, and we should say so plainly. Yes, it means 680 million potential customers, a regional digital market that the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement aims to grow from $300 billion today to $2 trillion by 2030.

But it also means Vietnamese coffee, Thai snacks and Indonesian fashion competing on our own shelves. Integration rewards the prepared. Our job is to make sure Filipino businesses are among the prepared, which is exactly why financing, mentorship and digital tools cannot be nice-to-haves. They are armor.

The summit’s concrete deliverables give me some optimism. The Philippines is launching the ASEAN Center of Excellence for MSMEs for regional business training and AMEN 2.0, a digital hub connecting entrepreneurs with mentors and investors, alongside sustainability training with the Global Reporting Initiative, a regional MSME financing report and a practical guide for selling online across borders. Notice what these have in common: they are tools, not communiqués.

Here the private sector deserves its due, and no one more than Joey Concepcion. As chair of the ASEAN Business Advisory Council for 2026, the Go Negosyo founder has insisted that ASEAN must be relevant to ordinary citizens, declaring that “ASEAN is not for big business alone.” This is his second turn at the helm; during the 2017 chairmanship he created AMEN, the region’s first legacy mentorship program for MSMEs, and 20 years of Go Negosyo have made mentorship a national habit.

His Trabaho and Negosyo initiative, combining job fairs with free entrepreneurship mentoring in malls nationwide, gets the economics exactly right: MSMEs generate more than half the country’s jobs, so every business we help start is employment policy by another name.

That is the real stake here. We talk about MSMEs as if they were a sector. They are not. They are the employment engine of this country and this region. A new bakery hires four people. A new logistics startup hires 40. Multiply that across 70 million enterprises and you understand why the fastest anti-poverty program ever invented is a thriving small business.

The Philippines holds the ASEAN chair this year. We have the programs, the financing windows, the attachés abroad and a private sector champion with regional convening power. What remains is execution, and urgency. As Concepcion himself put it, “The goal of ASEAN will not work if we cannot reach the last micro-entrepreneur.” Reach that last entrepreneur, and we will not just have hosted a summit. We will have started a hundred thousand businesses, and with them, a million jobs.

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