The short answer: Eight Filipino teams won spots in Impact Hub Manila's AI for Good Hackathon 2026, applying generative AI, computer vision, and edge machine-learning to disaster response, mental health, smallholder farming, and circular waste systems. Combined incubation support across the cohort exceeds ₱28 million.
From April 17–19, 2026, Impact Hub Manila convened 312 builders from 84 universities and startups across the Philippines for our most ambitious hackathon to date. Powered by Smart Communications, PLDT and our newest vertical partner — the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) — the AI for Good Hackathon 2026 challenged participants to ship production-ready prototypes in 48 hours.
"AI is no longer a frontier technology — it is everyday infrastructure," said Ces Rondario, founder and CEO of Impact Hub Manila, in her opening remarks. "Our job is to make sure the Philippines builds it on our own terms, with inclusion and impact baked in from day one."
The four challenge tracks
This year's hackathon was structured around four challenge tracks, each backed by a vertical partner:
- Disaster Response & Climate Adaptation — partnered with the Office of Civil Defense and WWF-Philippines.
- Mental Health & Youth Wellbeing — partnered with the Department of Health and the National Center for Mental Health.
- Smallholder Agritech — partnered with the Department of Agriculture and Mayani.
- Circular Economy & Waste — partnered with the Plastic Bank and the Asian Development Bank's Action for Climate Today fund.
The eight winners
After 48 hours of building, demos, and panel review, the final jury — chaired by DICT Undersecretary Yvette Cabrera — selected eight ventures to enter Impact Hub Manila's INCUBATE program with combined cash prizes of ₱1.4 million.
BantayBaha AI — Disaster Response Track Winner
A community-trained flood-prediction model that runs on a $35 edge device. BantayBaha fuses LoRa rainfall sensors with locally fine-tuned vision-language models to issue barangay-level evacuation alerts up to four hours before water reaches knee height. Already piloted in three barangays in Marikina.
Kumusta — Mental Health Track Winner
A Filipino-language mental-health companion app trained on a curated corpus reviewed by licensed psychologists. Kumusta's small-language-model runs on-device for privacy, and routes high-risk conversations to the Department of Health hotline. Public beta opens May 2026.
SaktoFarm — Agritech Track Winner
A computer-vision tool that lets farmers diagnose 24 common rice and corn diseases by taking a photo on a low-end Android phone. Built by a team of three Visayas State University students, SaktoFarm achieves 91% accuracy and works fully offline.
BasuraBot — Circular Economy Track Winner
A waste-segregation copilot for material recovery facilities. BasuraBot's vision pipeline doubles plastic recovery yield and produces verifiable documentation suitable for plastic credit issuance under the EPR law.
Four runner-up ventures — LawakanAI (typhoon damage estimation), HiraIA (sign-language interpretation), PalengkeIQ (wet-market price intelligence), and SiklabSolar (community microgrid orchestration) — also enter incubation with smaller cash prizes and full programming support.
Why this matters in 2026
"We are watching a generation of Filipino founders build with AI as their first language, not their last. The opportunity is enormous — and so is the responsibility to keep humans in the loop."
— Yvette Cabrera, DICT Undersecretary, AI for Good 2026 keynote
The 2026 cohort reflects a sharp shift from the 2021 Impact Hackathon era. Three years ago, a "tech solution" usually meant a mobile app and a dashboard. This year, every winning team shipped a model — fine-tuned, evaluated, and deployed — alongside their product. Six of the eight winners run their inference on-device or on edge hardware, sidestepping connectivity gaps that still affect 23 million Filipinos.
Impact Hub Manila has committed ₱28 million in combined incubation services to the cohort, including legal and IP support, GPU credits via our cloud partners, and structured introductions to the 14 funds in our Southeast Asia investor network.
What's next
The eight ventures begin a six-month INCUBATE residency on May 5, 2026. A demo day is scheduled for November 12, 2026, in Bonifacio Global City — open to the public and livestreamed.
The Impact Hackathon is part of Impact 2050, our flagship program for activating large-scale economic progress through groundbreaking events and curated support for innovators. Applications for the next vertical — Climate Adaptation 2026, scheduled for August — open June 1, 2026.
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