Civil society

The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport has transformed the Hands of Hope Community – an NGO-run autism school in Takhmo commune’s Prek Samrong village in Kandal province’s Takhmao town – into a public high school for the academic year 2020-2021 onwards. According to the ministry’s ...

In 2015, two years before the state-driven collapse of Cambodia’s political opposition, the national government dominated by the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) approved the Law on Associations and Non-Governmental Organisations (LANGO). When the law was first put forward in 2011, it was met with significant opposition, ...

The Working Group for Press Freedom has co-organised a two-week campaign with the theme “Information as a Public Good” on social media to promote and highlight the importance of the freedom of the press and urge the public’s participation. In a press release, the working group ...

Laos says women are now more respected and protected on International Women’s Day Monday, but the words might ring hollow to Houayheuang Xayabouly, who languishes in jail more than a year after her arrest for a Facebook post complaining about the communist government’s failure to ...

Concern continues to rise among civil society for the safety of members of the Bang Kloi Karen indigenous community who returned to their ancestral land at Chai Phaen Din in the Kaeng Krachan forest, after reports of a possible military operation to evacuate them from ...

Over a hundred participants from various sectors, which have been working on development issues in the Mekong Basin, attended the two-day seminar held in Chiang Rai’ Chiang Khong district, where has been one of the locations which have long suffered from development projects in the ...

After almost two decades of campaigning against hydro-dams and water projects built on the Mekong River, local civic groups and conservationists finally launched the “Mekong People’s Forum,” with the hope of moving their campaign to a policy level. The forum was held on Dec 1–2 in ...

Motivated to build a green industrial zone in Cambodia, the newly-established NGO Environmental Protection Industry Associations of Cambodia (Epiac) will work with Chinese-owned industrial park developer and operator QiLu (Cambodia) Special Economic Zone Co Ltd to set a new precedent for environmentally-friendly design and construction. On ...

More than 20 years ago, when two Chiang Rai-based environmentalists, Niwat Roikaew and Somkiat Kuenwongsa, learned that the Chinese government were blasting rapids in the upper Mekong River from Yunnan to Myanmar and Laos to clear the way for large commercial vessels, they started worrying. Back ...

Myanmar, a Southeastern Asian country roughly the size of Texas, houses almost 54 million people. In 2005, almost half of Myanmar’s population lived in poverty. However, a report released by the Central Statistical Organization (CSO) determined that Myanmar successfully increased its GDP and cut poverty to 24.8% ...