Social development

Two NGOs on Monday launched an online campaign to galvanize public support for providing students with free textbooks after a survey found that 85 percent of high-school pupils lack the necessary books for their studies. The Khmer Institute for National Development (KIND) and the Affiliated Network ...

The facilities at O’Chrey Primary School in Battambang province are allegedly so basic that it’s difficult to conceive of it as an actual school. The 219 grade one to four students get their lessons crowded in a wall-less storage hut at the edge of a cornfield, ...

A group of families involved in a land dispute with a businessman in Battambang province will today submit petitions to the National Assembly and Prime Minister Hun Sen’s cabinet to plead for intervention. The more than 300 families, from Bavel district’s Boeng Bram commune, maintain that ...

Hundreds of garment workers traveled from a Kompong Chhnang factory to Phnom Penh on Monday to petition the Ministry of Labor to intervene in their dispute with factory management. About 3,000 workers from the Chinese-owned Jiun Ye Garment factory have been striking since August 18, accusing ...

Experts say that Cambodia’s economic growth remains fragile and unsustainable, bringing environmental degradation, social inequality and, at times, unrest to the country. Cambodia has maintained a high economic growth rate in recent years, up to 8 percent, “but that high growth comes with high costs,” said ...

A national seminar on youth and cultural development was held here Monday with an aim to encourage young people to help safeguard, preserve and develop national culture, officials said. The two-day event brought together 700 participants, including culture officials, artists, archeologists, historians, and youths, said Culture ...

The Committee to Promote Women in Politics (CPWP), and civil society groups in Cambodia have asked the National Assembly and ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) to keep Mrs. Khuon Sodary as second vice president of the National Assembly. In a statement issued on Monday, the groups ...

About 70 residents from Kandal province’s Ponhea Leu district were blocked on Saturday from marching to Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Phnom Penh villa, where they planned to appeal for support in a long-running land dispute. The residents were representing 134 families from four villages in Chhvang ...

More than 15 months after a Global Witness report revealed that Vietnam’s state-owned rubber giant had illegally cleared land and displaced communities in Cambodia, the company has announced that it will accept and respond to complaints from those whose lives it has damaged. Vietnam Rubber Group, ...

The Ministry of Labour plans to delay signing off on a controversial agreement to reopen a pipeline of Cambodian maids to Malaysia until a deal is reached on a second agreement regarding other migrant workers, a ministry official said yesterday. Labour Ministry spokesman Heng Sour told ...

To get his teenage daughter and niece on a plane yesterday after 10 months of alleged abuse and forced marriages in China, Kim Vicheat* said he had to bury his family in debt because the Cambodian consulate refused to fund their repatriation. The two 19-year-olds told The ...

On Thailand’s border with Myanmar, also known as Burma, a malaria research and treatment clinic is stepping up efforts to eliminate a drug-resistant form of the parasite before it spreads abroad. Artemisinin medicines have been highly effective against malaria when used in combination with other drugs. ...

Australia has considered sending up to 1000 refugees to live on a remote island off the coast of impoverished Cambodia under a controversial resettlement agreement,, according to an opposition leader in Phnom Penh. Australian officials have visited several sites to accommodate the refugees now on Nauru, ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday announced a three-stage plan to raise the salaries of civil servants working under the Education and Health ministries, with the first increase to come in September. Speaking to graduating students at Beltei University in Phnom Penh, Mr. Hun Sen said that ...

Police in Kompong Chhnang province on Thursday were prevented from arresting workers and union officials outside a Samakki Meanchey district garment factory by a mob of irate protesters who pulled two of their colleagues out of a police car to thwart their arrests. About 3,000 employees ...

At least 2,800 bears in Asia were traded for their parts over the past decade, according to a report issued Thursday by an anti-wildlife trafficking group. The figure was arrived at after analysing nearly 700 bear-related seizures, and it likely represents a fraction of the overall ...

The Asia Injury Prevention (AIP) Foundation, supported by The UPS Foundation, has launched a global internet campaign to collect ten thousand pledges in support of the motorcycle passenger, including child helmet law in Cambodia, according to its statement obtained Thursday by The Cambodia Herald. The campaign ...

In yet another case of Cambodian women facing abuse in China, a 19-year-old told the Post yesterday that she has taken to living on the streets after the consulate in Shanghai refused to pay for her repatriation. Kim Sophea*, who claims she has been forced into marriage in ...

The faintings between January and August were much higher than the 802 reported in the whole of last year, while only one factory worker died in the workplace in 2013, the Free Trade Union of Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTUWKC) said in a ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen on Thursday lashed out at the rights group Adhoc, angered by comments rights workers have made about land grabs in recent years. During a speech in Phnom Penh, Hun Sen called a rights worker from the group “insolent and an idiot.” ...

Kratie town and provincial administrators met with representatives of families living alongside Kratie Town Hall yesterday after receiving a petition expressing villagers’ concern that the town hall planned to expand its premises onto their land. ...

Rights groups are calling for the release of three opposition activists who have been held in detention since violent clashes with security forces in July. The activists have been held despite a political deal last month between the ruling Cambodian People’s Party and the opposition Cambodia ...

Around 80 citizen journalists from around Cambodia held a meeting in Phnom Penh Wednesday, in a first-ever networking event for a new kind of reporter in the country. Professional journalists and other media professionals joined the event, sponsored by the Cambodian Center for Independent Media and ...

ANZ has ruled out helping hundreds of poor Cambodian families forcibly evicted from their land to make way for sugar-cane plantations that involved child labour and led to food shortages. Fairfax Media this year revealed confidential audits that disclosed that ANZ’s Cambodian subsidiary, ANZ Royal Bank, ...