In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

On a recent trip to Sri Lanka, I traveled by car from Colombo to Jaffna, a journey of more than 10 hours, and I discovered a city that seemed quietly determined to move forward. Two years after the devastating civil war between the Sri Lankan government and Tamil Tigers ended…

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A year ago, the Leuwiranji Elementary School in West Java was falling down. Located in a remote corner of the district of Bogor, the school’s 177 students come from poor families who are mostly employed in the sand-and-rock harvesting business that supplies a booming construction industry in Indonesia’s capital city of Jakarta.

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The Malaysian state of Sabah on the northern point of Borneo, though resource-rich, has the highest poverty rate in the country. Official figures claim 16 percent, but unofficial sources put the poverty rate as high as 24 percent. Interestingly, the face of the poor in Sabah is quite unlike that of the rest of Malaysia. [...]

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On a rainy day in October, I found myself in the hallways of a secondary school in Indonesia’s West Sumatra. The classrooms were filled with colorful decorations and the vibrant sound of children’s voices buzzed through the building. A loud school bell mixed with the call to prayer coming from the mosque on the school [...]

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When I first visited Vietnam in 1989 as a young graduate student, the country had recently undergone the doi moi, or economic reform policy, but there weren’t any physical signs of change yet. Hanoi in April 1989 was a gray city, preternaturally quiet with bicycles as the main mode of transportation, and electricity limited to [...]

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Today is International Literacy Day, an occasion to acknowledge that, despite advances in education worldwide, there are still hundreds of millions of people who do not have the ability to read and write. In fact, Asia is home to 75 percent of the world’s illiterate population. Faced with such a shocking statistic, it is natural [...]

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Pakistan’s floods have left 10 million people without shelter and created one of the worst humanitarian disasters in history. As the water finally begins to recede in some parts of Pakistan, many communities are attempting to return home. Nowshera, located in Pakistan’s war-torn Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, previously known as the North-West Frontier Province, was one of [...]

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Early this month, The Asia Foundation’s Digital Media team traveled to Khishig-Undur Soum Village, 200 miles northwest of Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar, to meet this fourth-grade class and to deliver books donated by Books for Asia. Vote for your favorite children’s book in the video, and a copy of the winning book will be delivered to [...]

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Forced child marriages continue to plague young women throughout the world, depriving them of their most basic rights, including access to education. According to UNICEF, child marriages (under 18 years old) are most common in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with Bangladesh ranking one of the highest at 65 percent. Rukhsana Zaman Shanu, from Bangladesh’s [...]

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The paved road from Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar ends abruptly with a pile of rocks and a sign bearing an exclamation point, as if the rocks alone weren’t reason enough to stop. “From here it’s going to be a bumpy and long ride,” said Myangaa, our driver for the day-long journey into Khishig-Undur. And with that, [...]

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