Beyond sex

REPRODUCTIVE health may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one is trying to think of development strategies, and it wouldn’t be surprising if development wasn’t really inside any of Ifugao Governor Glenn Prudenciano’s thought bubbles while he was trying to cobble together a reproductive-health code for his province.

But planned or not, some observers are betting that Ifugao’s new Reproductive Health Code could help get the province out of its rut, and not only because it may lead to families that can feed all their members adequately.

In the latest story in i Report‘s current series on good local governance, contributor Frank Cimatu visits a remote Ifugao town and mulls over how the province’s two-month-old code could bring changes to it. He also notes that several local governments are now taking reproductive-health matters into their own hands after attempts at addressing these at the national level went nowhere.

Prudenciano, in fact, was inspired by a similar code in Aurora province, and now Ifugao’s version seems to have sparked nearby Mountain Province’s interest in writing its own. Perhaps this is the start of a reproductive-health revolution?

Read on at pcij.org.