Chi Redaja leads both phases of a massive project in the Philippines: “Strengthening the Transition of Vulnerable Communities” affected by the North and South Commuter Railway Projects, otherwise known as STVC North and STVC South.
Maria Benilda Redaja, known to most as Chi, was sitting under the warm, provincial sun of Samar with a group of women, chatting the afternoon away and periodically having a swig of bahalina, a local coconut wine. A casual observer of the idyllic scene might think they are friends gathered to catch up on the news of the day – but Chi was, in fact, in the middle of work.
Had she gone earlier in the day, the women would not have been as welcoming. “The first few times I visited them to discuss how our programme can help them with their livelihoods, I noticed they were reluctant to share information,” Chi said. “I brought this up to my boss then and she told me, ‘Go in the afternoon.’”
True enough, it worked. In the mornings, the women devoted their time to household chores like cooking and washing clothes, leaving them with little energy to engage with strangers. “Since then, I would go in the afternoon because that was when they’d be relaxing and drinking their bahalina.”
Once formed, the bond and familiarity the women had with Chi gave the Filipino development aid worker a natural opening to introduce them to activities to build skills and improve financial literacy. It started with conversations about the rural women’s husbands, then about their home life, finally trailing into territory concerning income generation.
“I would ask them, ‘What are your dreams? What do you want to learn about?’ And they would tell me, ‘I want to get into fish-drying or seaweed farming’. These mothers live in a coastal town. We developed livelihood ideas that suit them, and from there, I’d teach them how to save money, how to know if they’re making profit or not – all the essentials of running a micro-enterprise,” Chi says.
Developing a keen level of sensitivity and being able to identify what a community needs is nothing new to Chi. After numerous development projects, she headed a national, government-run poverty reduction programme dubbed “Kapit-Bisig Laban sa Kahirapan-Comprehensive and Integrated Delivery of Social Services” (KALAHI-CIDSS) that, under her direction, improved access to basic services for 8.9 million individuals, paving the way for their participation in inclusive local planning and development.
Today, Chi leads both phases of a similarly ambitious project in the Philippines, which NIRAS is providing technical assistance for: “Strengthening the Transition of Vulnerable Communities” affected by the North and South Commuter Railway Projects, otherwise known as STVC North and STVC South.
Funded and administered by the Japan Fund for Prosperous and Resilient Asia and the Pacific and the Asian Development Bank respectively, both phases of STVC are designed to support thousands of households through capacity and opportunity building activities, while linking them to the right institutions that will provide the social and economic assistance they need in the long run. These households are situated where the railways will be built and consequently have to be relocated.
The STVC team has been supporting the Philippines’ Department of Transportation and Philippine National Railways in their joint efforts to ensure households are not worse off after the railway construction, through a mix of assistance that includes livelihood interventions and facilitating appropriate compensation for structures and other assets that might be lost.
With the project’s long-term impact on vulnerable households, Chi would hold meetings in the early morning. And like clockwork, the STVC Team Leader would be the first to arrive at the meeting place.
“I’m an early riser,” the 60-year-old Chi says. “I admit, I have a surplus of energy compared to most people my age. I've always been someone who's perpetually moving, whether I’m at work or at home – you will seldom see me just sitting and not doing anything.”
Ever on the go, she is accustomed to catching the sun rise and working hours after it has set, partly due to her experience with projects of similar scope.
Before leading STVC, Chi was the national program manager for KALAHI-CIDSS, a Department of Social Welfare and Development project. There, she organised her team to provide post-rehabilitation support to over 17,000 barangays – communities that make up the smallest unit of administration in the Philippines – across the country, training close to two million community volunteers and quickly adjusting plans amid Typhoon Yolanda (known internationally as Haiyan), which hit several regions hard back in 2013.
“That was crazy time because we had to help victims recover from the effects of Yolanda. Working in an emergency situation means you need to make yourself available almost 24/7. So, yes, it was stressful,” Chi shares. “But I’d like to believe that experience prepared me to become a better development practitioner and manager. In the peak of operations, we were managing 9000 people and getting grievances almost everyday. Everyone felt they deserved to be helped first after the typhoon. It was a tough test of tenacity under extreme pressure from our stakeholders.”
Similarly, the first phase of STVC was also impacted by an unforeseen event – COVID-19 – forcing everyone to quarantine inside their homes and significantly altering any plans of face-to-face training and meetings. The pandemic naturally made meeting project participants even more difficult for the teams and mentors, whose engagement with affected households is integral to STVC.
“We really saw how she successfully guided everyone in working around the new context, even integrating hybrid modalities for mentoring and other types of strategies to make sure the project runs smoothly,” says STVC Deputy Project Manager Chezka Tabajonda.
Together with the team she led in the first phase of STVC, Chi was able to make a difference in the lives of over 1000 households, encouraging flexibility and creativity in mentoring approaches and adopting proactive strategies to bring in partners from the government and non-government organisations, as well as resources for household participants before they set foot in new communities.
As a child, Chi had many dreams. She wanted to become a ballet dancer, a writer and nearly every profession she was exposed to or saw on television. Later, she would become a teacher.
Chi studied and finished college on a scholarship from the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (now the National Commission on Women) and took up postgraduate studies at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
It would take nearly a decade, a marriage and becoming a mother before she found her passion in development. “I’d have stayed in teaching. I loved it, but I got married and it was difficult to juggle work and being a first-time mom. So I quit my job and found a vacancy with an NGO,” she says. “I had no idea what I was getting into.”
“Those who are interested in development need more than a good degree. They also need experience. It's experience that actually sharpens your understanding of things, your grasp of what works in what conditions. Even when you know all the frameworks in the world, immersing yourself is still different, especially in communities. You need to understand where people are coming from and and how you can help them help themselves.”
Chi Redaja
Fortunately, this decision would prove to be one that led Chi to her calling. "I have always craved tackling real life challenges, and I think I found that in development because it allows me to interact directly with people," she added.
Like many development professionals working in the field, Chi has collected a great deal of memories and stories from those she has encountered.
A painful memory for her was a documentary project she produced tackling child prostitution in the Philippines. She had to interview children who were being sold off by family members to be exploited online. “They were being peddled by their own families. Their mothers, their grandmothers. I couldn’t stand what the young girl was telling me,” Chi says, adding that the child was only 13 years old at the time of her interview, but had disclosed that her family has been exploiting her since she was 10.
Harrowing as stories like this are, they fuelled Chi’s passion to help people turn their circumstances around.
“That’s what I love about development – the problem-solving part. I love the fact that you always try to find solutions, which can be very complex – sometimes, it would take more time to figure out; other times, it would require other kinds of investments,” she says.
Where many might balk at challenges in the workplace, Chi openly welcomes them and at times even seeks them out.
“I eat challenges for breakfast,” she says in jest and adds that, like breakfast, these challenges can come from a number of sources. “It's a challenge if you have a deadline to meet and you have very short timeline. Challenge also comes when you have a very big scope for a project and you have to deal with many stakeholders like we do in STVC, where decisions have to be made by multiple decision-makers.”
Development challenges, Chi says, spark an initial flash of inspiration. Solving them is what gets her mental gears turning. “I love the idea that when I’m faced with a difficult situation, I can find a solution. It’s the solution-finding part that excites me because it forces me to think.”
Being immersed for years in the sector, where there is a never-ending current of issues to overcome, the Filipino development worker thrives in understanding socio-political realities, picking them apart then piecing together a viable plan to eradicate systemic failures and, in the process, learning about what happens to the marginalised. It is precisely this exposure to real life that she attributes her determination to, something she encourages aspiring development workers to go after.
“Those who are interested in development need more than a good degree. They also need experience,” Chi says. “It's experience that actually sharpens your understanding of things, your grasp of what works in what conditions. Even when you know all the frameworks in the world, immersing yourself is still different, especially in communities. You need to understand where people are coming from and and how you can help them help themselves.”
If Chi’s life as a development aid worker could be turned into a TV series, there would be no shortage of lessons and storylines. But perhaps a takeaway would be a need to always be on your toes, rising early for meetings and working late into the night. This is because only ceaseless work can effect actual change, and only with the participation of many – from individuals to institutions – can the world become the ideal that people like Chi have been striving for throughout their lives.
