Eric Aseo

Standing at the beach of MacArthur Park just south of Tacloban city in Eastern Visayas, the Pacific Ocean looks playful and gentle – a sharp contrast from a year ago when Super Typhoon Haiyan, “Yolanda” in the Philippines, pounded the region, leaving more than 6,300 dead…

Marilyn Ecap, a 42-year-old street typist, is a permanent fixture at the main gate of the former Divine Word University campus in Tacloban City. For 12 years she has made a living typing documents for a fee, disrupted only when Super Typhoon Yolanda…

The recent controversy about temporary shelters – or bunkhouses – for victims in Yolanda-hit areas offers some lessons not only in emergency response but also in reconstruction efforts. These are not new lessons…

Last month, when the 7.2 earthquake struck the Philippine provinces of Cebu and Bohol, I was in the southern city of Zamboanga facilitating dialogues between Muslim and Christian leaders to alleviate possible religious tension following the September siege that displaced thousands and threatened the good relationship of the city’s two faith communities. It was the furthest thing from my mind that an even more devastating disaster would happen just a month later, right in Tacloban City, where I had left my wife and kids in safety (or so I thought) and in the province of Eastern Samar where I grew up playing in the gentle edges of the mighty Pacific Ocean.

How do you solve a problem like corruption? Do you catch the corrupt and pin them down?  Not necessarily, if you ask the cities of Calapan, Iriga, Roxas, Santiago, Sorsogon, and Tacloban in the Philippines. They do it differently. These cities have found a way to counter possible occasions of corruption through the The Asia Foundation’s Localizing… Read more