In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

Female entrepreneurs in Bangladesh represent a miniscule percentage of business owners (0.05 percent), according to The Asia Foundation’s 2010 firm-level survey results. Issues of concern to women business owners, such as difficulties in accessing information on regulations…

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For three days in December, individuals from a range of industries gathered at the 3rd Annual Big Ideas Fest to explore the future of education. In a venue overlooking the Pacific Ocean, a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley, teachers, administrators, and representatives from policy and advocacy groups…

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On Monday, Malaysia’s High Court acquitted opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim of sodomy charges after a highly publicized and controversial 2-year trial. As Malaysia looks to elections in 2013, which are widely expected to be called later this year, In Asia‘s editor, Alma Freeman, interviews Herizal Hazri and Nurshafenath Shaharuddin in The Asia Foundation’s Malaysia office for insight into how the verdict could affect elections, Prime Minister Najib Razak’s recent democratic reforms, what this says about the independence of Malaysia’s judiciary, and more.

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In September, my colleague William Cole and I wrote about a revolution in data analytics that is affecting how many of us in the development field manage and analyze information. In that blog post, we expressed support for the growing open data movement that is an integral part of this transformational moment.

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In the early weeks of October, people across Thailand experienced great heartache and even disbelief as they watched news coverage of rising floodwaters submerging several sizable industrial factories north of Bangkok one by one. During the first weeks of the flooding, we listened patiently…

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The Philippines long had a terrible reputation for telecommunications, with Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew famously saying that in 1992, 99 percent of the population in the Philippines was waiting for a phone and 1 percent was waiting for a dial tone. However, beginning with the administration of Fidel Ramos (1992-1998) and followed by President Estrada (1998-2001), the telecoms industry was liberalized, and phone ownership skyrocketed.

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In recent years, a revolution in data analytics has changed the way both public and private sector institutions share, manage, and analyze information – and it’s a revolution now reaching developing nations. In Timor-Leste, the Ministry of Finance has just made current, real-time national budget statistics available online.

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A rapidly increasing number of people across the globe are now staying connected to one another via a mobile phone device – whether it’s an iPhone, Nokia, or Samsung. In fact, the United Nations reported earlier this year that the worldwide figure for cell phone subscriptions had topped five billion at the end of 2010. According to the International Telecommunication Union, approximately 3.8 billion of these mobile subscriptions were from developing countries…

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India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world, with an average GDP growth of about 9 percent over the past several years. Yet corruption remains a pressing problem in the nation of 1.2 billion. The Asia Foundation’s Katherine Loh spoke with T.R. Raghunandan…

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During the 1980s, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), an NGO working in rural Rajasthan in India, began to campaign for access to government records related to wage employment programs for the rural poor. In the course of its work, MKSS discovered that accessing official records and information was critical to exposing corrupt practices…

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