Women's month feature: Empowered women in Mindanao people talk about

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — Residents of central Mindanao and in Moro provinces have stories of empowered women they are proud about during the observance every March of the International Women’s Month

One of them is a popular kidney specialist, the physician Pamela Mamaluba, known for spending no less than 12 hours a day during weekdays attending to Muslim and non-Muslim patients in Cotabato, Maguindanao del Norte and Maguindanao del Sur provinces and from different barangays in this city.

There are talented women too in the 80-member parliament of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, among them an engineer, Baintan Adil Ampatuan, the former planning director of the now defunct Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao that got replaced with a more politically empowered BARMM in 2019 as a result of 22 years of peace talks between Malacañang and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

Ampatuan is assertively loud in discussing women and children’s issues in the BARMM parliament.

BARMM’s present regional state prosecutor is a woman, lawyer Rohaira Lao, admitted to the Philippine Bar in 2004.

Lao, a Maranaw, started as a state prosecutor in the central office of the Department of Justice and then became Maguindanao's provincial prosecutor.  She was appointed as BARMM's regional state prosecutor in July 2021 by then President Rodrigo Duterte.

The provincial prosecutor’s offices in BARMM five provinces had secured convictions, via the judiciary, of many illegal drug cases after Lao got appointed as regional state prosecutor, something quite unusual in a region confronted with extremely peculiar security challenges.

There is another lawyer, Stella Joy Segocio, who has a different kind of work, one that made her quite sensational in Region 12 and provinces outside.

Segocio is the head of a private mining firm’s legal and compliance division and, as such, has a key role in ensuring, via communications and community-service efforts, its full operation in South Cotabato province in 2005.

She has a Bachelor of Arts major in psychology degree from the Ateneo de Manila University and studied law at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City.

She gained popularity in Region 12 for her role in the dissemination of the importance of their company’s planned mining operations in South Cotabato to the socio-economic growth of the local communities and generation of revenues essential to the expansion of the health, education and social welfare programs of local government units in the province.

Drema Quitayen-Bravo, a teacher by profession, is also popular as manager and host of a morning community affairs program of the Catholic Station DXMS here, one of five stations in Mindanao of the Notre Dame Broadcasting Corporation of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate congregation.

The NDBC radio stations pioneered peace and conflict-sensitive journalism in central Mindanao, where there are  many towns that are still struggling to rise from the adverse effects of decades of secessionist conflicts and bloody clan wars.

The managers of two other Catholic NDBC stations are women --- Grace Vergara Tanghal of DXOM in Koronadal City, and Myra Agnes Piñol of DXND in Kidapawan City.

There are female disc jockeys in the Catholic NDBC broadcast outfit, among them a Maguindanaon named Nikki Lintongan and Lalaine Bolongon and Marivic Advincula, both of Visayan descent, who all have thousands of followers on Facebook.