In Tugaya, on the western shore of Lake Lanao, the workday at Lantong Pangcoga’s workshop moves down a line. One worker feeds raw wooden frames through the planer. Another bends over the smoothed boards with a pencil, tracing okir, the curling vine-and-fern motif that has marked Meranaw royal houses for centuries. Further along, specialist carvers set slivers of nautilus shell into the channels, and at the end of the line the pieces are sanded and varnished until the grain glows.
Some of the hands on that line belong to people with desk jobs. Government employees and formal workers take unfinished pieces home after office hours for extra income.
“Lately, our workshop stays busy every single day,” says Pangcoga, owner of LN Collectible Handicraft. It was not always so. A few years back, he recalls, people lacked the drive to go out and sell, simply because buyers were hard to find.
That change now has a number attached. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, the share of families in Lanao del Sur living below the poverty line fell from 64.2 percent in 2018 to 3.2 percent in 2025. Counted by individuals, the rate dropped from 71.2 percent to 5.7 percent over the same years. To be counted as poor in 2025, a person in the province had to live on less than PhP 35,570 a year, roughly PhP 2,960 a month.
For anyone who knows the province’s recent history, that figure reads almost like a misprint.
A long climb from the bottom
In 2015, more than seven of every ten families in Lanao del Sur lived below the poverty line, one of the highest rates in the country. In 2017, the five-month siege of Marawi gutted the provincial capital and displaced hundreds of thousands. Then came the pandemic, closing the markets and fairs that artisans and farmers depended on.
The road down has not been a straight line. The PSA recorded a steep fall to 7.4 percent in 2021, then a rise to 12.1 percent in 2023, before the latest drop to 3.2 percent. Recovery here is real, but it has been uneven, and the people living it tend to speak about it with care.
Many threads, one cloth
No single industry explains a turnaround of that scale, and the people in this story would be the first to say so.
Reconstruction spending in and around Marawi rebuilt roads, schools and public buildings and put thousands to work. The Bangsamoro government’s annual block grant has funded services that barely existed a decade ago. National cash transfer programs reach poor households directly. Remittances from Meranaw workers in other cities and abroad have long held families together. Compensation for siege survivors, gains in farming and trade, and the simple return of peace to daily commerce have all moved the numbers.
Tourism is one thread among these, and in pure peso terms not the largest. But it carries something the others do not. A cash transfer supports a household; a festival gives a whole community a reason to make, sell and show the things it has always known how to make. Talk to the people working in Lanao del Sur’s creative and cultural economy, and a common theme runs through their accounts: culture has become something the province can live on, alongside everything else.
Heritage with a paycheck
What strikes Pangcoga most is not the tourists. It is his own neighbors.
“The biggest change I notice today is that Meranaws themselves are buying our products, not just tourists or outsiders,” he says. “That tells me our local economy is actually finding its footing.”
He credits the province’s cultural calendar with making local pride something people spend money on, especially the provincial Sarimanok Festival and the Langkit Festival, Marawi City’s annual charter day celebration. Being brought to national trade fairs such as Likha has given artisans a larger stage. The effect ripples across the province’s craft map: woodcarving in Tugaya, mat weaving in Buadiposo-Buntong, the lakub containers of Marantao, balud weaving in Bacolod-Kalawi, langkit in Marawi City and landap weaving in Pualas.
His workshop’s assembly line is itself an argument about how a craft economy lifts families. “Even if someone has not learned how to carve okir yet, there is always a task in the process where they can contribute and earn a daily wage,” he says. A master carver’s skill anchors the enterprise; a dozen other livelihoods hang from it.
For years, Pangcoga shared the common fear that traditional crafts were dying. What changed his mind was a practical insight about young people. “To get young people onboard, you first have to show them that woodcarving can put food on the table.” When a large order arrives, he invites local youth onto the team so they earn from the first day. The Schools of Living Traditions, run under the Bangsamoro Commission for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, supply training, tools and materials. Pangcoga goes a step further and helps apprentices sell their own work. Seeing a stranger buy something they made, he says, is what keeps them coming back to the bench.
Threads into the future
A generation younger, Amar Cayongcat is working the same seam from a different angle. His social enterprise, Nditaren Tano, weaves langkit, the intricate woven bands that traditionally join the panels of a malong, into contemporary apparel that young people actually want to wear.
What began as appreciation became a business, and the business, unexpectedly, became an education. “The deeper we went into understanding the business, the more we also discovered about our culture,” he says: its stories, its craftsmanship, the people behind it.
Cayongcat sees young visitors arriving from across Mindanao, drawn by festivals, by heritage, and by the cool highland air around the lake. Young Meranaw and non-Meranaw alike are filming vlogs and posting what they find. To him it is evidence that the old calculation, that ambition means leaving home, is starting to break.
He is careful not to oversell it. “The challenge now,” he says, “is how we can make these opportunities more sustainable, so that young people can actually turn their passion and creativity into a decent and lasting source of livelihood.”
Technology, in his view, is a translator rather than a replacement. “Technology and social media are not meant to replace tradition,” he says. “They are tools that allow us to tell our stories in a way that the younger generation and a wider audience can understand.”
A farm built by the displaced
Some of the most telling evidence comes from outside the workshop entirely. IKRAM Agriculture Cooperative began as a community enterprise built by families displaced by the siege. Today its mushroom farm is an accredited Learning Site for Agriculture and a small agri-tourism destination, drawing students, teachers and organizations on study tours, along with families who come for the archery range, the camping tents, and the pick-and-pay fresh mushrooms.
“The local festivals, cultural exhibits, and eco-tourism activities are not just events,” says Sittie Aireen Mai, who chairs the cooperative. “They are driving our community’s growth.”
When the provincial governor’s office chose IKRAM’s mushroom crackers and polvoron as premium souvenirs for the Araw ng Lanao del Sur celebration, Mai says, the income went directly to local farmers, hardworking mothers and youth.
That directness is deliberate. Asked how the cooperative makes sure events like the recent farm tourism activity with the Bureau of Tourism, under the Bangsamoro Ministry of Trade, Investments and Tourism, actually benefit grassroots families rather than organizers, Mai’s answer is simple: the community runs everything itself. IKRAM hires no outside agencies. Its farmers, women and youth lead, host and organize every activity, which keeps booking fees and sales with local families. The farm sets aside space to display the community’s own mushroom products. And neighbors along the route, seeing visitors pass their homes, have opened small stores of their own.
Mai has watched visitors change over the years. “Years ago, guests would arrive a bit hesitant, often viewing Marawi City and our province purely through the lens of conflict recovery,” she says. “Today, people arrive with open minds, eager to truly see us.” They want to get their hands dirty, to learn how the cooperative turns agricultural waste into a working enterprise. And they pay attention to where their money goes. “They don’t just want a souvenir,” she says. “They want to make an impact.”
She describes the transformation in the language she grew up with. Mula sa pagiging isang lugar na may mga hamon, ito ngayon ay isa nang masiglang sentro. From a place defined by its challenges, she says, the province has become a vibrant center of eco-friendly agriculture and tourism, one that lifts the life of every Meranaw family.
What the numbers are really measuring
A poverty rate is an abstraction. It cannot hear a planer running on a weekday afternoon, or see a teenager holding up the first okir panel she was paid to sand, or know that a mother in a barangay just sold out of mushroom crackers.
Nor can it say which cause mattered most. Reconstruction, public spending, social protection and peace itself did much of the heavy lifting, and they will need to keep doing it. What cultural tourism adds is harder to count and easier to overlook: a reason for young people to stay, a market for skills that were nearly lost, and a way for the province to be seen by outsiders as it sees itself.
These statistics matter because of what they may be recording underneath: a province deciding that the things it has always known how to make, the carving, the weaving, the farming, the welcome, are not relics of a harder past but part of the foundation of a livable future.
Pangcoga puts it in craftsman’s terms. Never build something just to sell it quickly, he tells his workers; build something the buyer will cherish for a long time.
It is a fair description of what Lanao del Sur is attempting with its own recovery. And Cayongcat, asked what he wants visitors to take home, offers the line that may best explain what the data is measuring.
“Lanao is not just a place with a story from the past,” he says. “It is a place where stories are still being created today.”