News

About 30 former residents of the Boeng Kak community submitted a petition on Friday morning to the World Bank office and several embassies in Phnom Penh, calling for a halt to all funding for longtime anti-eviction protesters from the Boeng Kak area. The Boeng Kak counter-protesters ...

Cambodia was host to a two-day information and communication technology conference and expo held by the The National ICT Association of Malaysia on Friday. By 2012, 19.1 million SIM cards for mobile phones have been sold while on the internet side, around 2.7 million people ...

International donors, including the U.S., Australia, the European Union and the World Bank, have urged the Cambo­dian government to redesign a massive hydropower project in Stung Treng province that environmentalists say will deplete fisheries and submit it to the Mekong River Commission (MRC) for consultation. In ...

Government revenues totalled more than $700 million over the first four months of the year, an 11 per cent year-on-year increase, data from the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) show. In total, the revenue made by the General Department of Taxation (GDT) rose by about ...

Instructors at the Royal University of Phnom Penh have just finished the first academic year of a landmark physics course. Launched in the fall of 2012, “Renewable Energy and Applications” aims to train students so they can seek internships and jobs in one of Cambodia’s fastest-growing ...

A land titling campaign in Cambodia launched and financed by Prime Minister Hun Sen’s lacks transparency and could leave thousands of people landless, a human rights group said Wednesday, urging the country’s donors to push for reform of the program. The campaign, which employs volunteer youth ...

Cambodia’s share of modern biomass in total energy consumption is among the highest in the world, according to a report released Tuesday by the World Bank and the International Energy Agency. The report also found that growth in Cambodia’s dependence on renewable energy excluding traditional biomass ...

Nearly nine out of 10 Cambodians have confidence in local financial institutions, a trend that stands in sharp contrast to Europe and the US, a poll published last week found. However, industry insiders question the results, as the Kingdom’s financial services are still under-developed. The poll ...

When a 100-metre-long section of a Phnom Penh garment factory crumpled in on itself like a cheap pup tent, Sen Sok district officials promised an investigation. The results of that investigation, which was to have taken place more than a year ago, in March 2012, ...

The Arbitration Council, an independent body that resolves labor disputes in Cambodia’s garment sector, celebrated its 10th anniversary yesterday, though officials expressed concern that funding for the body was due to run out in March next year. Oum Mean, secretary of state at the Ministry of ...

Cambodian migrant workers sent home $256 million last year, according to a report from a U.N. agency and the World Bank, which was released in Bangkok yesterday. The report from the bank and Rome-based International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD), titled Sending Money Home to Asia, ...

On May 13, we ran an interview with London-based NGO Global Witness accusing the Deutsche Bank and the International Finance Corporation of financing two Vietnamese rubber companies that are allegedly involved in land grabs in Cambodia and Laos. We asked both banks for a response ...

A Vietnamese rubber tycoon has rejected accusations by Global Witness, a group that campaigns on resource issues, that it was involved in a land grabbing crisis in Southeast Asia. Doan Nguyen Duc, the chairman of Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) Group, told Vietnamese media the information ...

In the wake of a new report from environmental rights group Global Witness rebuking the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Deutsche Bank for investing in rubber plantations accused of illegal logging and forced evictions, both institutions have denied responsibility and deflected the blame ...

The World Bank has warned that the rapid growth of lending by Cambodia’s Banks is still a concern, despite a recent slow-down in credit disbursals. “Credit growth, which has been driven largely by wholesale and retail financing, and starting in 2011 agriculture financing, has eased to ...

The government has won an arbitration case in a World Bank court, successfully countering a $300 million claim made by a U.S based company over a failed power plant project dating back to 1996. According to a statement from the Council of Ministers’ Press and Quick ...

Cambodia’s banking industry recorded a slight increase in lending in the first two months of this year after a sharp rise last year, according to a consolidated data provided by the National Bank of Cambodia (NBC) on Saturday. The data showed that the kingdom’s 33 commercial ...

More than a week after the World Bank blacklisted a Canadian construction firm over bribes allegedly paid in Cambodia and Bangladesh, it was still unclear Thursday whether the government, or the national anticorruption body, are investigating the allegations. SNC-Lavalin Inc. was banned from World Bank contracts ...

Cambodian export values increased more than 21 per cent in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, and officials said the rise was a positive sign for the Kingdom’s economic growth. According to the Ministry of Commerce’s export data ...

Internet search giant Google on Friday launched a new service that for the first time allows users to instantly translate Khmer script into other languages. Khmer is the most recent addition to the 66-strong collection of languages between which words, sentences or whole websites can be ...

A bribery investigation by the World Bank has discovered misconduct by a major Canadian construction firm that was awarded a $5 million contract to help expand access to electricity in rural Cambodia, the bank said. In December 2009, SNC-Lavalin announced that it has been awarded ...

The World Bank upgraded Monday its GDP growth forecast for Cambodia to 7.0 percent for this year, up 0.3 of a percentage point from its last projection in December. “In Cambodia, a likely stabilization in high-income country conditions should support further improvements in garment production and ...

Going by the World Bank’s method of grouping nation states by their wealth, Cambodia this year could become a lower-middle income country. Not satisfied, however, with this graduation—a feat in itself from Cambodia’s position of extreme poverty just two decades ago when gross domestic product (GDP) ...

The World Bank is under pressure to review some of its policies around the world to ensure that in countries like Cambodia it is not funding the wrong projects. In a discussion at George Washington University this week, panelists said the World Bank is needed for ...