Iloilo beckons - and the migrants flock back

[MANILA] Jennifer Ann Palmares-Fong has come home. Fifteen years after leaving Iloilo in the Philippines for the bright lights of Manila, she and her friends have been lured back as her once-quiet hometown is transformed.

"Never in my wildest dreams did I expect there would be these developments mushrooming all over," Ms Palmares- Fong, 32, said as she prepared to take clients to view a site for new US$57,000 condominiums. "It used to be a sleepy place; now, at night it's all lights."

Iloilo, the second-largest city on Panay Island, is at the centre of the country's biggest provincial transformation since independence in 1945 as President Benigno Aquino tries to reverse decades of migration to Manila and abroad.