Philip Emmanuel Castañeda Penaflor

Project Management, Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist

Dr. Philip Emmanuel Castañeda Peñaflor, is an international monitoring and evaluation practitioner from the Philippines, and currently a member of the Board of the Pilipinas Monitoring and Evaluation Society (see http://pmes.org.ph/who-we-are/about-pmes).  He dreams of a world without war and violence but filled with the laughter of children, and he tries to contribute to building the kind of world that he dreams of by engaging in development work as an international development worker in conflict and post-conflict situations in some parts of the world, whether in education, agriculture, rural development or humanitarian assistance.  He has worked in South Sudan, Afghanistan, Vanuatu and Timor Leste and has traveled to several other countries as Project Management and Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist.

He holds a PhD in Applied Cosmic Anthropology from the Asian Social Institute, Manila, where he also obtained his master’s degree in General Sociology.   His PhD dissertation was about “A Phenomenological Exploration of Community Intangibles in Lautem District, Timor Leste, and Its Implications for Development Planning” from which he wrote a paper on intangible assets and another paper on appreciative community self-assessment. As a social scientist he is greatly interested in the predicament of poverty of the majority which he believes to be the result mainly of bad governance by decades of oligarchic rule.  In his book entitled: “Rethinking Hope and Peace, Social Change in the Philippines” (2016), he describes how change could be possible in the Philippines by unsubscribing to the rule of the oligarchy.

A former Executive Director of the Philippine Partnership for the Development of Human Resources in Rural Areas (PhilDHRRA), a national NGO network in the country involved in sustainable rural development, Philip has also served as  adviser for the Unified Monitoring and Evaluation system of the Basic Education Assistance for Muslim Mindanao (BEAM-ARMM) program in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao,  supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the government of Australia.  He is currently Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Adviser for Asia of the Fundacion Educacion y Cooperacion (EDUCO), an international NGO working on children’s rights based in Barcelona, Spain.

A commissioned Lieutenant Colonel in the Philippine Army Reserve Command who holds a master’s course in National Security Administration from the National Defense College of the Philippines, he would rather want to see governments of the world invest more on education, poverty alleviation and peace-building than on arms.