Social development

The Swiss government will provide $12 million to the Kantha Bopha Children’s Hospitals for three years more, Health Minister Mam Bunheng said on Sunday. He said Swiss Ambassador to Cambodia Ivo Siebber announced his government’s commitment on Thursday during a meeting with him at the ...

The Royal University of Phnom Penh’s department of psychology has seen a decrease in students and its dean has blamed a lack of human resources and decreased interest in the subject. Phan Chan Pov, dean of the psychology department at the university, said there are ...

The Interior Minister plans to meet with top officials from the country’s NGOs twice per year in an effort to address concerns raised by the groups and to gather recommendations for national development.​ ...

The Council of Ministers on Friday approved its national budget draft of about $6.7 billion for 2019, an increase of 11.4 percent over 2018, and NGOs now want to review it before it is sent to the National Assembly for ratification. According to the draft, ...

The UN Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Cambodia, Rhona Smith, is to land in the Kingdom on Monday, in her first official visit since questioning the “genuineness” of the July 29 national elections, polls she claimed were “one-sided”. ...

Phnom Penh’s Dangkor district administration will tear down illegal houses and shops built on the bank of Prek Thnot river, said its administrative director Mok Puthea. He said illegal homes, shops, cafes and canteens in Teuk Thla village along the river in Kraing Pongro commune ...

Rice wine operations in Kratie province have been shut down indefinitely with immediate effect after a toxic batch recently killed several people and hospitalised others. Kratie provincial industry and handicraft department head Ny Chhun said the objective of the move is to reduce the harm ...

As of Sunday, the death toll from toxic rice wine consumption in Kratie province had increased to five. Forty others remain hospitalised, the provincial health department said. Department director Chhneang Sovutha said the sale of rice wine had been banned in the province’s Sambo district ...

Cambodia’s construction boom has pushed thousands of families into modern slavery in the brick industry through debt bondage, a report by researchers from London’s Royal Holloway University say. The blood bricks report was released on Tuesday following the sharp rise in Cambodian brick prices in ...

Indigenous people in Mondulkiri province’s Keo Seima district yesterday expressed concern over logging activities in the Phnom Prich Wildlife Sanctuary, which they claim is allowed by some commune authorities.​ ...

Ricketson said after his release from prison in September that he started helping poor Cambodian scavengers many years ago and will resume again. He and three others started a fund-raising website “Family By Family”, hoping to initially raise $50,000. ...

A committee of more than 20 national and international organisations filed a petition to the EU on October 10 to prevent it from signing a timber trade agreement with Vietnam, noting that the deal would be disastrous to the Kingdom’s forests. The petition claims Vietnamese ...

Cambodia’s foreign ministry on Thursday said a decision by the European Union to ramp up trade pressure on the country over human rights concerns was an “extreme injustice”, adding it risked destroying decades of development in the country. ...

ANZ Bank failed to meet its own human rights standards when it financed a Cambodian sugar plantation that was linked to forced evictions, child labour and workplace deaths, according to an Australian government investigation. ...

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Cambodia has reportedly “apologized” to the Cambodian government for publishing poverty statistics almost three times as high as the official estimate. ...

Poverty in Cambodia has fallen dramatically over the last two decades, and continues to fall at a rapid pace, said a high official of the UNDP to Khmer Times yesterday. All the poverty rateslines, either based on income and other dimensions, have seen big reductions at a ...

Authorities in Kratie province yesterday demolished a dozen family farms deemed illegal in Snuol district’s Khsoem commune. A villager who requested anonymity said that the demolition was conducted by provincial and district authorities along with police and military police officers. ...

The Poutil ethnic community members from Busra commune in Mondulkiri province’s Pichreada district handed two men to district police for further action on Thursday, after they allegedly cleared many hectares of forest in their community. ...

Top Cambodian educators have downplayed a global report that ranked the Kingdom 77th out of 80 countries in English proficiency, saying that language skills would not hurt economic competitiveness in the region. ...

Thirty-five per cent of Cambodians are still living in poverty, with the rural population making up the majority, according to estimates from the 2018 global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative ...

The Japanese and Cambodian governments have allocated $1,5 million to fund phase five of the Bayon temple restoration project, a Unesco official said on Tuesday. Unesco Culture Programme Specialist Philippe Delanghe told The Post yesterday that the project which is slated to begin this year ...

Beat Richner, a Swiss pediatrician who opened a network of children’s hospitals in Cambodia at a time when quality health care was all but non-existent in that country, died Sept. 9 in Zurich. He was 71. ...

The Kingdom’s teachers want a raise. That’s the demand from a prominent teachers’ union, which has applied to march to the Ministry of Education on World Teacher’s Day to submit their salary request. The Cambodian Independent Teachers’ Association (CITA) wants teachers to receive at least ...

Forest activists in Ratanakkiri province’s O’yadav district said on Thursday that a group of Cambodian and Vietnamese traders are colluding with officials and transporting timber from their community forest to Vietnam after they had illegally felled trees there early this month. ...