Jennifer Carisma Bretaña is a licensed Urban and Regional Planner in the Philippines who emerged as Top 1 in the country during the licensure examination for environmental planners in 2013.
She graduated Cum Laude when she earned her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Broadcast Communication from the University of the Philippines. Aside from her Master of Public Administration degree, she also earned her International Joint Master of Science Degree in Regional Development Planning from the University of Dortmund in Germany and the University of the Philippines-School of Urban and Regional Planning where she had been a recipient of the Dean’s Medallion for Academic Excellence.
She had been chosen as a Philippine delegate to International Leadership and Exchange Programs such as on Local Administration in Japan in 2005, on Grassroots Democracy and Role of NGOs in Nation-building in the USA in 2006, and in the Summer School on Reconciling Biodiversity and Livelihood Development in Protected Area Management in Kathmandu, Nepal in 2016. She had been a Resource Speaker and Panelist to the Open Government Partnership (OGP) global summits and workshops in Tbilisi, Georgia in 2018, Ottawa, Canada and Brussels, Belgium in 2019 sharing South Cotabato’s experiences on making the government more transparent, accountable and participatory so that it serves the citizens and not the other way around.
Currently, she is the Provincial Planning and Development Coordinator of the Province of South Cotabato and the Point of Contact of Open Government Partnership (OGP)–South Cotabato where she manages and coordinates the province’s Integrity Program, the South Cotabato Integrity Circle and Multi-stakeholder Forum, and the implementation of South Cotabato’s global OGP Commitments on Open Data, Open Contracting, Open Monitoring and Evaluation, Open Legislation and Open Mining Information, together with her team of equally devoted integrity warriors (Jennifer Guadalupe-Ilao and Doreen Mae I. Vallar).