Mariejo Ramos profile background image
Mariejo Ramos profile image

Mariejo Ramos

Inclusive Economies Correspondent, Southeast Asia

Thomson Reuters Foundation

Mariejo Ramos is an inclusive economies correspondent based in Manila, Philippines. Before joining Context, she was a reporter at the Philippine Daily Inquirer, covering climate and social justice. She has earned recognition for her work in the Philippines and abroad, including the best investigative report award from the Catholic Mass Media Awards in 2019 and the Journalism for an Equitable Asia Award in 2021. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in anthropology from the University of the Philippines.

November 08, 2024

Land is key to the identity, culture and earnings of Indigenous Filipinos, but a lack of deeds or true rights opens ancestral communities to outside encroachment and environmental damage.

The rights of Indigenous Filipinos to their ancestral lands are supposed to be protected by the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997.

November 07, 2024

Alex Quinones has been a rice farmer in the Philippines for almost five decades - last summer was the first time his field dried up, forcing many of his neighbours to swap farm life for street sweeping.

"We were not able to harvest any rice. This drought was unlike anything we experienced before," Quinones, 62, told Context from his farm in Oriental Mindoro province, southwest of Manila.

October 28, 2024

A growing number of nations in Southeast Asia are imposing rules that hold producers responsible for the blight of plastic pollution.

The world produces a staggering 400 million tonnes of plastic each year, and an estimated 20 million tonnes wind up in the environment.

October 18, 2024

Cici Brinces came to Lebanon as a domestic worker 14 years ago, married a Palestinian, had a son, survived leukaemia and was building a new life. Then bombs began falling in Beirut and now she wants to go home to the Philippines.

"I feel that the end is near for me - worse than when I had cancer," said Brinces, 46, who fled her home near the airport two weeks ago and lived on the streets for days before moving into a shelter with her 10-year-old son.

October 04, 2024

Crowd-sourced data could help better predict the effects of the tropical storms and typhoons that regularly batter the Philippines and so save lives, disaster risk experts said.

When Typhoon Gaemi hit the country in late July, Mahar Lagmay, head of the Nationwide Operational Assessment of Hazards (NOAH), requested people submit photos of flooding in their area to contribute to the project's flood hazard models.

September 26, 2024

Territorial wrangling over who owns the South China Sea has strangled local marine life, say scientists, urging China and the Philippines to set aside political differences and work to save the fish, coral and plants that live border-free.

A tug of war over the sea – spanning more than 3.5 million square km - has divided the two nations for over two decades, a standoff built on deep history and modern economics.

September 12, 2024

Efren Dominico has been a fisherman in the Bay of Manila in the Philippines for 43 years and survived countless storms, but nothing prepared him for the day when an oil tanker sank off the coast in July and cut him off from his livelihood.

The motor tanker Terranova capsized and sank off the tow of Limay, on the western side of Manila Bay, carrying 1.4 million litres of oil, the largest oil spill in the country since 2006.

August 29, 2024

SAGADA/PARACALE, Philippines - It's a man's world mining gold in the Philippines - but it's the women who come off worst.

Be it cooking toxic pans of mercury, scouring mud pools for cheap slivers of hope or sluicing the boggy soil - women do the hardest jobs and get paid the least. 

August 12, 2024

Fishing has been a lifeline for Alejandro Alcones for the past four decades, but he now fears his small boat may be replaced by a floating solar farm on the Philippines’ largest lake.

Alcones is part of a group of fishermen opposed to the government’s plan to place solar panels atop Laguna de Bay, one of the country’s biggest sources of freshwater fish, as it looks for renewable energy sources to meet growing demand for power.

August 05, 2024

Food delivery driver John Jay Chan has had no protections from the record-breaking heatwaves that have hit the Philippines in recent months, but he must continue to work nine-hour days to provide for his family.

"We understand that the nature of our work means we're exposed to extreme heat," said Chan, a 30-year-old father of two, who has been a motorbike gig worker for the past six years.