By Josh Friedman

Under a blazing sun and temperatures rising to nearly 90 degrees, Mongolia’s Prime Minister Batbold Sukhbaatar and all 12 of his cabinet members held their August 27 cabinet meeting seated at tables and chairs set up in the sand in the middle of the Gobi Desert, 415 miles south of the capital Ulaanbaatar.

The Gobi Desert stretches across 30 percent of Mongolia's land. Last week, cabinet members gathered here for a cabinet meeting to draw attention to global climate change. Photo by Flickr user Munkho Gehrke, used under a Creative Commons license.

Wearing green “Save Our Planet!” baseball hats, the ministers met for one hour to discuss Mongolia’s national response to climate change and issue a statement pledging to fight against global warming.
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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 each student of Khishig-Undur.

By Jon Jamieson

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, we pulled onto a small trail worn by decades’ worth of travelers making their way across the vast, barren landscape of Mongolia.

We were on a trip to deliver books to a classroom of fourth-grade students in this far-flung, rural community nearly 200 miles from the capital, and to film the journey for the third installment of our “Choose a Book, Change a Life” campaign.  (Watch the first and second videos of kids in Thailand and Bangladesh receiving their books.)

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By Tserenkhand Choijinnyam

The vehicles traveling from Khovsgol Province in northwest Mongolia to Ulaanbaatar have to spend the night on the way because it’s such a long journey. These roads that connect Mongolia’s rural countryside with Ulaanbaatar have provided new opportunities and access to thousands of people who otherwise would have remained isolated. However, for some people like Undarmaa, this journey means much, much more: it helps put an end to her worst nightmare.
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By Davaasuren Baasankhuu

Last week – February 15 – marked the deadline for Mongolia’s highest-level officials and civil servants to reveal all: all of their financial and material worth, that is. Civil servants and officials were required to submit Asset and Income Disclosure (AID) statements by that deadline, with disclosures from the top 270 officials posted on a public website. Collecting the statements is one of the main responsibilities of the Independent Authority Against Corruption (IAAC) of Mongolia, established soon after the passage of the Anti-Corruption Law in 2006. The legislation requires that the president of Mongolia, all Parliament members, judges, central bank governors, auditors, prosecutors, civil servants of ministries, implementing and regulatory agencies, local government authorities, and state-owned entities must submit their AIDs every year.
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By V. Bruce J. Tolentino and Davaasuren Baasankhuu

With four-fifths of its export income dependent on mining exports, Mongolia was hit particularly hard by the recent international economic crisis. A recent New York Times article goes so far as to say that Mongolia is arguably Asia’s hardest hit country. For a nation experiencing a period of rapid growth averaging 9 percent per year from 2004 to 2008, such a plunge is disappointing and unsettling, to say the least.
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Over the last two decades, Asia has been the fastest growing region in the world, explains Bruce Tolentino, Asia Foundation’s Director of Economic Reform and Development Programs. Yet even in these fast-growing countries, poverty and inequality has persisted. In a new video, Tolentino explains some of the key impediments to broad-based economic growth and how the Foundation’s programs address continuing poverty and inequity. Watch the video below to learn more. This week, Tolentino blogs about one fast-growing nation, Mongolia, and its push to recover from the global recession.

By Meloney Lindberg and Joshua Friedman

With the signing of a landmark investment agreement in October, Mongolia is about to undergo a mining boom. The country has several world-class mineral deposits that remain undeveloped today. As the Mongolian government prepares to sign more deals to begin developing these deposits, protecting the country’s environment and water resources is critically important. Climate change is also becoming an increasingly significant issue facing Mongolian herders and the nation’s fragile ecosystems.
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Today, International Anti-Corruption Day, The Asia Foundation released its eighth semi-annual Corruption Benchmarking Survey (CBS) in Mongolia. The only surveying tool in Mongolia that gauges corruption on the household level, the survey was conducted in partnership with the Sant Maral Foundation using multi-level randomization and face-to-face interviews. Findings from the survey indicate that Mongolian households are increasingly paying more bribes, with one in every five Mongolian households having paid a bribe within a three-month period.

Since 2006, The Asia Foundation has conducted this survey twice a year to monitor the scope, incidence, and impact of corruption at the household level over time, in an effort to analyze trends and strengthen institutional and public capacity to deter and reduce corruption in Mongolia. For more information, download the full report.

Last week, USAID, Radiohead, and MTV EXIT announced that their music video collaboration had received the prestigious 2009 Asia-Pacific Child Rights Award. The USAID-MTV EXIT (End EXploitation and Trafficking) campaign in partnership with influential UK-rock band Radiohead produced the innovative music video for their song “All I Need” off the album In Rainbows.

All MTV EXIT programming was produced rights-free, allowing for the MTV Europe Foundation to give the programming away for free to any broadcaster or organization, thus maximizing the overall reach of these important anti-trafficking messages. Read the full press release.

The Asia Foundation collaborated to launch the first-ever MTV Exit Campaign in Mongolia beginning in 2007 and dedicated to producing content against human trafficking for a Mongolian audience. Read more about the Foundation’s anti-trafficking work in Mongolia.