The launch marks the fruits of a global convention, however the true story was the life it celebrated: a Kagay-anon social scientist who spent 54 years exhibiting that information is strongest when it serves individuals
CAGAYAN DE ORO, Philippines – For many years, Dr. Magdalena Cabaraban skilled generations of scholars in analysis strategies, survey evaluation, statistics, and gender research, instilling in them the precept that scholarship should not simply serve journals however serve communities.
Over a 12 months after the pioneering Kagay-anon social scientist handed away, the Jesuit-run Xavier College-Ateneo de Cagayan opened a brand new chapter within the lifetime of social science in Mindanao.
One in all its convention rooms buzzed with dialog, papers rustling, and cameras clicking as teachers, policymakers, and relations gathered for the launch of the Dr. Magdalena Canag Cabaraban Memorial Fund on Friday, March 6.
The ceremony marked the fruits of the two-day 2026 Worldwide Scientific Convention of the Philippine Inhabitants Affiliation (PPA), however the true story was the life it celebrated: a Kagay-anon social scientist who spent 54 years exhibiting that information is strongest when it serves individuals.
Cabaraban’s profession was a blueprint for social analysis with affect, shaping the examine of society within the Philippines. A magna cum laude graduate of Xavier-Ateneo, she earned a PhD in Sociology specializing in inhabitants research and deepened her experience in social and financial statistics at George Washington College.
She additionally contributed as a fellow with the World Well being Group, mixing rigorous quantitative strategies with a relentless concentrate on human welfare.
Her analysis addressed a few of the Philippines’ most urgent social challenges: maternal and youngster well being, gender equality, migration, inter-ethnic relations, and local weather resilience. However her affect prolonged past numbers. She championed the concept that social science is most significant when it empowers the susceptible.
“Analysis and educating are my main undertakings,” she as soon as wrote, reflecting on the craft that grew to become her life’s work.
She was born in Leon, Iloilo on July 22, 1938, and he or she died in Cagayan de Oro on November 25, 2024, town the place she and her husband Henry raised a household and the place she spent the better a part of her years.
She was 86 when cardiac arrest claimed her, after an extended wrestle with a coronary heart situation that had required angioplasty. Loss of life in her case was each an finish and a punctuation to a life lived with objective and rigor, the type that leaves behind greater than reminiscences and units an ordinary.
Her husband Henry hailed from Northern Mindanao, from Balingasag in Misamis Oriental, east of Cagayan de Oro. They met in Manila, the place she was a tutorial scholar at Manuel L. Quezon College and he was renting an area at her uncle’s home. It was not a glamorous starting, however it was the beginning of a partnership – a wedding – that will endure a long time.
They settled in Cagayan de Oro, the place she pursued her training at Xavier-Ateneo, incomes her diploma at the same time as all 5 of their youngsters had already been born.
Her daughter Sharina stated that as a scholar of Sociology, the late Jesuit priest Francis Madigan, founding father of the Analysis Institute for Mindanao Tradition (RIMCU), had seen her brilliance. He invited her to work as an information encoder at a time when computer systems have been monumental and unwieldy machines. She was quickly absorbed as a full-time workers member at RIMCU, starting a profession that would go away an indelible mark on social science in Cagayan de Oro and elsewhere in Mindanao.
The memorial fund in her honor goals to proceed that legacy, supporting aspiring social scientists who share her imaginative and prescient of evidence-informed coverage making with a human contact.
Dr. Chona Echavez, RIMCU director at Xavier-Ateneo and PPA president, stated the fund will help analysis work of undergraduates and graduates alongside pursuits near Cabaraban’s coronary heart.
Echavez stated the memorial fund, which will probably be managed by RIMCU and Xavier-Ateneo’s Division of Sociology and Anthropology, may even assist younger researchers take part in conferences and different capacity-building actions to make them extra competent and higher outfitted.
Don Antonio Velez, assistant professor on the college’s sociology and anthropology division, stated, “This fund is a tribute to a lady who believed that information is strongest when it’s used to serve the susceptible. By launching it in the course of the PPA Worldwide Scientific Convention, we guarantee her dedication evokes researchers throughout the globe.”
The launch was the spotlight of the 2026 Worldwide Scientific Convention, themed “Intersections: Inhabitants, Surroundings, and Local weather Resilience within the Philippines,” which introduced collectively native and worldwide demographers, teachers, and policymakers to debate inhabitants developments, local weather challenges, and the nation’s demographic dividend.
For the household of Cabaraban, who attended alongside colleagues and students, the memorial fund was greater than a monetary endowment. It celebrated a life spent asking not simply, “What does the info say?” however, “How can this data serve the neighborhood?”
Via this fund, her legacy won’t solely be remembered in textbooks and journals, however lived every day within the work of social scientists who proceed to comply with her instance: merging numbers with nuance, statistics with social conscience, and analysis with real-world affect. – Rappler.com
