Maria Teresa Habitan

Ma. Teresa Habitan grew up playing childhood games and roaming the streets of the Sampaloc district of Manila in the ‘60s and ‘70s. She honed her street smarts in Ramon Magsaysay High School and at the University of the Philippines where she took up BS in Business Economics. She purposely avoided taking up the subject of public finance, deciding it was boring. She later found it funny and ironic that she spent her entire 44-year career in government doing public finance practice at the Department of Finance.