Infrastructure

A new US$10.9 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will fund a three-year project by international development NGO East Meets West (EMW) to improve sanitation and hygiene among the poor in rural Cambodia and Vietnam. According to EMW, the program seeks to combat the negative effects of ...

The Cambodian government has committed to the construction of five dams along the Mekong River in order to meet a huge demand for electricity, but environmental groups warn that severe repercussions loom for this strategy. “While each project proposed in Cambodia comes with a different set ...

A Cambodian-Thai delegation visited the cross-border railway site in Stung Bot Wednesday to examine the old line and a metal bridge which is being replaced, officials said. In addition to Stung Bot, where a new international border crossing is planned for Banteay Meanchey province, the officials ...

Thai construction company Ch Karnchang has continued work on the controversial Xayaburi dam in Laos, even as the Lao government has assured other Mekong River nations that the project is postponed pending further environmental studies, the company’s CEO said yesterday. Ch Karnchang’s CEO Plew Trivisvavet told ...

Construction of the main structure of the supposedly on-hold Xayaburi dam could begin by the end of this year, the Thai company contracted to build it said yesterday. Ch Karnchang chief executive Plew Trivisvavet said preparatory work at the site of the proposed US$3.8 billion, 1,285-megawatt ...

Work has resumed on a controversial $3.5 billion dam across the Mekong River in Laos, its Thai developer said on Thursday, contradicting Laotian assurances it had been suspended following protests over its environmental impact. Laos agreed in December to suspend the Xayaburi dam project and said ...

The sole provider of water and electricity in Koh Kong province’s Khemerak Phumin town, LYP group, was demanding that all rental buildings install water meters at exorbitant rates for the region, residents said yesterday. Building managers sent intervention papers to provincial governor Bun Leut on July ...

The 30,000-square-meter expansion of Phnom Penh International Airport may be halved, saving some of the 262 families living on adjacent land from eviction, a government official said yesterday. Despite the possible change in plans, a majority of families could still face eviction because they live ...

Forty-four garment factory workers were injured in a traffic accident yesterday morning in Svay Rieng province as they traveled to work in the back of an open truck, police said. The workers were riding in the truck when it overturned after colliding with a tractor-trailer on ...

A consortium of election NGOs had banded together in a bid to push through a Campaign Finance Law that would put a ceiling on political party campaign spending ahead of next year’s national elections, representatives said yesterday. The NGO Working Group on Political Finance has embarked ...

Samdech Prime Minister Hun Sen said this week that he will talk with Chinese leaders especially his Chinese counterpart PM Wen Jiaboa about finance to build 300-500 km rural roads in the country in contribution of helping poverty reduction and living conditions of the local ...

In an outbuilding at Lok Sear’s rice milling operation in Kandal province, two four-meter-high cylindrical machines vibrate and hum as the occasional chicken and duck pecks near the concrete blocks holding them up. While they do both feature a thinck band of aluminium around their ...

Officials at a recent energy conference in Phnom Penh stressed that Cambodia needed to use energy more efficiently to meet regional goals, boost economic development and lower overall harm to the environment. More than 150 energy officials from the public and private sectors came together for ...

Cambodia on Wednesday inaugurated a 128-kilometer China-funded national road No. 62 in an effort to boost social and economic development in northern provinces. The road, from Kampong Thom province’s Kampong Svay district to the provincial town of Preah Vihear province, cost about 52 million U.S. dollars ...

Villagers belonging to a Thai activist group filed a complaint to Thailand’s Administrative Court yesterday for the cancellation of an agreement form the country’s Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand to buy power from a controversial mainstream Mekong dam in Laos, an NGO representative said yesterday. “According ...

Political activists and watchdog organisations say Cambodia’s US$13 million revenue from the mining sector over the last five years is exceedingly low and that the government must be more transparent. The claims come after the Ministry of Mines, Industry and Energy (MIME) released its figures on the mining ...

For Cambodian farmer In Chanthy, illuminating the rural night used to be tiresome task. His village in Svay Rieng province is not connected to the national electricity grid and to light the dark he would have to take car batteries to a station and pay ...

Phnom Penh: “Cambodia is needing $ 1 billion over the years or at least 100 million annual investment to develop renewable energy projects for rural electrification in order to reduce its dependence on diesel consumption,” said Mr. Toch Sovanna, Director of Departmemnt of Energy Technique, ...

For the past several days, Boonma and seven other Houay Souy villagers have travelled back to their homes near the Xayaburi Dam building site on the Lao side of the Mekong River. Since the beginning of the year they have been relocated to a new ...

Speaking to an audience of more than 150 private- and public-sector energy officials at the Second East Asia Summit Energy Efficiency Conference, officials agreed that not enough was being done to convince manufacturers and other large consumers of energy to switch to new energy efficient ...

Cambodia’s small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are busily preparing for the ASEAN Economic Community’s free flow of goods in 2015 and are probably not that different from the other 10 ASEAN member states’ own SMEs.  Te Taing Por, president of the Federation of Associations for ...

Phnom Penh’s mountains of garbage might be keeping the city’s lights on as early as 2015 if all goes according to plan, developers and city officials have said. Under a new proposal presented to Phnom Penh Municipal Hall last Tuesday, the Green Asia Global Corporation is ...

Cambodia Airports will invest $100 million next year to expand the size of its airports in Siem Reap City and Phnom Penh and double the number of passengers that can pass through its two main hubs in the country, an official airport operator said yesterday. Emmanuel ...

The biggest US trade delegation to Cambodia in decades joined Secretary of State Hillary Clinton here as the two countries look to expand their economic relationship beyond exports of cheaply produced garments. “On the economic front, there is much more room for us to grow ...