As part part of its multibillion-dollar Urban Transport Master Plan, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) unveiled a modern rail system for Phnom Penh yesterday that could begin operation as soon as 2023. The trains would thin out traffic on the capital’s choked-up roads, which currently lack ...

The growing market for timber in China is leading to widespread logging around the world, including in Cambodia, according to a report released yesterday. The report from London-based NGO the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) – entitled Appetite for Destruction: China’s trade in illegal timber – outlines ...

Fourth-year students at Phnom Penh’s Royal University of Law and Economics (RULE) have been barred from writing their theses on 14 topics, including Cambodia’s new bourse, according to a letter posted online yesterday. The letter, signed by the university’s research department director Kong Saphon ...

The Land Management Ministry has complied with an order made by Prime Minister Hun Sen for factories to provide adequate places for garment workers to eat. Land Management Minister Chea Sophara yesterday told provincial subordinates that canteens must be built in factories. ...

Cambodia on Tuesday requested the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to consider providing aid – especially to the elderly, people with disabilities and orphaned children. In the meantime, the bank is studying the country’s social welfare system before announcing a raft of technical assistance as part ...

Cambodia will host the biannual meeting of Mekong Delta labour ministers in two weeks’ time when they will discuss having a common social security net for workers. Labour Minister Ith Samheng said last week that he will meet with his counterparts from Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and ...

Beginning this year, the Education Ministry will hand over management of 625 primary schools, 4,874 teachers and over 170,000 students to 14 districts in Battambang as part of a new initiative to decentralise and improve primary education. The districts will also absorb the management of ...

Garment workers have begun leaving the area surrounding embattled Veng Sreng street en masse, following the outbreak of clashes early on Friday morning. An estimated 80 per cent of the more than 10,000 workers who live and are employed in the Meanchey district suburb have vacated ...

Thousands of students were unable to attend classes yesterday after returning from holiday, as more than 500 schools remained closed due to flooding that has claimed 50 lives so far this year. According to a report released by the National Committee for Disaster Management, 513 schools ...

As a child growing up in a poor family in Banteay Meanchey, Yang Leaphea struggled to imagine a world outside her province. She turned to her desperately under-resourced local library, but found few books there to expand her horizons. All that changed when the intelligent daughter ...

Thousands of garment workers at one Phnom Penh factory, and about 100 more at another, protested Thursday over the new minimum wage set for the garment sector late last year, upset that those already earning higher salaries were overlooked. ...

One of six union leaders charged and summonsed for questioning over a strike that ended in government forces shooting dead at least five people in January has sent a message to authorities to hurry up and get his hearing over with. ...

While it may be unpopular, nearly everyone has had to do homework. Yet for those living in communities with no or intermittent access to electricity, the ability to study at home is sometimes a luxury. In Cambodia, French non-profit association Lumières sur le Mékong – ...

The government has released a schedule for minimum wage discussions with unions and factories this year, as workers continue to demand $177 per month to keep up with the rising cost of living. More talks are scheduled from July through January. ...

On the southern outskirts of Cambodia’s capital, a ramshackle factory turns out tens of thousands of bricks each month. Pale rows of freshly fired bricks wait for buyers under the corrugated iron roof, while a 50-meter-long oven leaks a dull heat as it bakes a ...

A South Korean-owned garment factory bowed to union pressure Thursday and agreed to pay its former workers wages they are owed, following a meeting with the Ministry of Labor. ...

Cambodia’s Ministry of Labor granted about 25,000 work permits to foreigners in the first six months of 2015, about 5,000 more than the total of last year, a local newspaper reported Friday. ...

Starting in August, the Labor Ministry plans to focus its work permit crackdown on “Western companies.” ...

The mass fainting spell that affected the Hung Wah Cambodia Garment Manufacturing factory in Phnom Penh yesterday  has been blamed on the lack of sleep due to fire trucks having been nearby during the night putting out a blaze. There has been some debate over ...

Adding to a growing list of foreign groups to censure the Cambodian government in the lead-up to the ASEAN Summit, the International Labour Organization yesterday ranked Cambodia among the biggest violators of the right to freedom of association. The Cambodia section of the report, which collated ...