‘Nothing happened’ after the Philippines drew up a startup roadmap. Now it’s trying again.

The main Philippines business district Makati City Photo credit: bensonkua.

When the Philippines launched a roadmap for startups a year ago, you would think all the pieces were finally coming together for the ecosystem to move forward. But it hit a standstill.

“In real terms, nothing happened,” Mon Ibrahim, innovation consultant at the Philippines Department of Information and Communications Technology, said without mincing words during a breakout session at the 2016 Geeks on a Beach conference last week. “We were waiting for the community to organize themselves so we can work better with them.”

Under the roadmap, the country seeks to create 500 startups with total funding of US$200 million and a valuation of US$2 billion by 2020. Stakeholders – from the private and public sectors – were supposed to develop a coherent strategic plan on how to achieve these goals and execute that plan.

“The roadmap is there but nothing’s happening on the execution side,” Jojo Flores, co-founder of accelerator Plug and Play,” told Tech in Asia on the sidelines of the conference.

There’s no structure, and people working on the roadmap are there on a voluntary basis, explained Jojo. They have their own businesses to run so “everyone went back to their offices and got busy again.”

However this year, Jojo said they would pick up where they left off by setting up a formal organization of startups in the Philippines called StartupPH.org rather than just a Facebook page.

The decision was brought about by necessity, he said. “The government told us, ‘We can’t deal with a Facebook group. You have to organize yourselves.’”

Jojo Flores (far left) moderates the panel on StartupPH.org at the Geeks on a Beach conference in Panglao, Bohol in the Philippines. Mon Ibrahim (far right) talks about updates from the government. Photo by Geeks on a Beach organizers.

It’s uncertain whether the organization will be registered as for-profit or nonprofit, or as a trade organization. What’s clear at the moment is it will serve as a council that will lobby for the benefits and needs of startups, and coordinate with the government in crafting friendly policies. Its website has been live for a couple of weeks.

Jojo leads the org on an interim basis, and the first order of business is to create an online database of all active startups in the Philippines. “We need to know who you are and that you exist. How else can we try to help you if we don’t know you exist? That’s the premise.”

Jojo envisions StartupPH.org to be the go-to site for investors who are looking for startups they’d want to invest in.

Apart from that, it will also allow access to government funding for startup events. He noted that most startups cannot afford to attend tech conferences and therefore miss out on the opportunity to meet investors. “The government told me that they have money, but if there’s no organization, we will not have access to it.”

Vital for gov’t dealings