Education

Thailand needs schools that are more flexible, autonomous, and decentralized. Principals who are “instructional leaders” are the key link between national reforms and what happens in the classroom.

As Asian economies grow ever more online, STEM education has emerged as a vital pathway to the future of work for girls and young women.

The USAID Digital Workforce Development project in Cambodia is a five-year project targeting Cambodian youth, equipping them with enterprise-driven skills, training, and qualifications that will enable them to contribute to Cambodian society and succeed in an economy that is becoming increasingly digital. In the interest of enhancing the informatio… Read more

As part of The Asia Foundation’s commitment to supporting sustainable development in Malaysia, with funding from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Foundation has undertaken a project to support the growth and improvement of Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) in Malaysia. For this initiative, the Foundation… Read more

In Cambodia, scholarships provide important pathways to enable girls to achieve both secondary and university education. The Cambodia Tertiary Scholarship Program is a project of The Asia Foundation in close partnership with KAPE. The program has enabled more than 146 female students from vulnerable families in Kampong Cham province to obtain bache… Read more

With schools closed due to the Covid-19 lockdown, poor communities lacking access to e-learning facilities in small cities and rural areas were severely impacted. The Safe Home Initiative mitigated the impact of Covid-19 on families disproportionately affected by the pandemic in remote districts of Punjab and Sindh, including Sajawal, Sukkur, Khair… Read more

The Asia Foundation and The Estée Lauder Companies Charitable Foundation (ELCCF) have renewed their commitment to transforming the future of economically and socially disadvantaged adolescent girls in Vietnam and Indonesia through education and skills development programs. Since the launch of ELCCF’s Scholarship program in Vietnam in 2010, The Asia… Read more

Michelle Obama came to December’s Grassroots Leaders Roundtable in Vietnam to deliver an urgent message: some of the world’s best minds are going undeveloped because of our failure to educate girls.

Featuring Meloney Lindberg, Country Representative, Cambodia, The Asia Foundation Todd Wassel, Country Representative, Laos, The Asia Foundation Michael DiGregorio, Country Representative, Vietnam, The Asia Foundation Nikita Desai, Associate Director of East Coast Philanthropy, The Asia Foundation (Moderator)

Educating a girl transforms her life and the lives of those around her to catalyze economic, social, and health benefits with lifelong impact. Providing girls and young women in Vietnam with opportunities to pursue an education and build 21st century skills is one of the most effective ways to support girls and women to exercise their voice and lea… Read more

Educating girls is one of the most effective ways for countries to achieve their economic potential, improve health, reduce conflict, and save lives. Yet many funders in Asia have been reducing education support, at precisely the time when growing inequality in a number of Asian countries is profoundly affecting girls’ access to education.

Girls Learning & Leading Program Launches in Cambodia Shiseido Asia Pacific, in partnership with The Asia Foundation, officially announces the launch of the Girls Learning & Leading Program (GLL), which aims to equalize access to education, opportunity and mentorship for marginalized women in Southeast Asia. Greater access to education is o… Read more

RTI International, with support from The Asia Foundation, SIL LEAD, and Florida State University, are implementing the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) and the Philippine Department of Education’s (DepEd) ABC+: Advancing Basic Education in the Philippines (ABC+) project. ABC+ is designed to improve education outcomes and… Read more

Educating a girl changes her life and the lives of those around her. Education catalyzes a range of economic, social, and health benefits that reach far beyond individual transformation, benefiting families, communities, and entire societies. Providing girls and young women with opportunities to pursue an education is one of the most effective ways… Read more

Cambodia has a very high rate of labor migration to other countries, and a dramatically changing economic landscape. It also has very high drop-out rates in secondary schools. Cambodia’s state education system has been slowly but steadily improving under a set of ambitious, long-term reforms by the Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport…. Read more

The Boeing Company and The Asia Foundation announce a one-year vocational training program in Hanoi and Hai Duong to provide a holistic training program focused on practical information technology skills development for disadvantaged young adults in Hanoi and Hai Duong provinces. The Asia Foundation has been working to support youth in Vietnam, par… Read more

Today, The Asia Foundation signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Cambodia’s Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MoEYS), and Kampuchean Action for Primary Education (KAPE) to implement the Books for Cambodia program. Over the next five years, the program will distribute high-quality English storybooks and educational resource books to 1,000… Read more

The year 2007, according to traditional astrology, was the Year of the Golden Pig. It was believed that good fortune would come to families who gave birth during this auspicious time. Regardless of the role that astrology may have played, Mongolia’s annual birth rate grew from 50,000 in 2007 to nearly 90,000 in 2014, and Mongolia today is one of th… Read more

Traditional classrooms in ASEAN countries are exceptional for turning out high-performing students, well-skilled in memorization, recitation, and deference to seniority, an approach some say doesn’t equip students for a dynamic, entrepreneurial, and rapidly changing world. According to the World Economic Forum, young people will best succeed in the… Read more

Asia Foundation trustee Tim Kochis in A&S Marquette Magazine In his wide-ranging career, Asia Foundation Trustee Tim Kochis has been a nationally prominent wealth manager and strategic consultant, a six-time author, a philanthropist, and an educator. At U.C. Berkeley, where he cofounded the university’s personal financial planning program, an a… Read more

Turo-Turismo is a project run by The Asia Foundation in the Philippines, through our Coalitions for Change (CfC) partnership with the Australian government. Beginning with a pilot program in Bohol in 2014, later expanded to the adjacent island provinces of Cebu and Siquijor in 2016, the tourism-focused training and immersion program prepares high s… Read more

In 2018, the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) STEM Education Regional Workshop brought together 50 YSEALI members from across ASEAN countries to promote STEM education among youth. Participants in the workshop had an opportunity to participate in informational sessions, discussions on STEM education and challenges, and break-out se… Read more

As Myanmar emerges from decades of military rule, challenges surrounding urbanization, governance, and gender-based discrimination are becoming more evident. In this critical transition, a number of organizations are stepping up to ensure that women and girls are heard, including Colorful Girls, a grassroots organization leading a movement to empow… Read more

This study of corruption and ethical misconduct in the education sector was conducted in Ulaanbaatar and four aimags: the regional centers Dornod, Darkhan-Uul, Orkhon, and Khovd. A total of 1,240 respondents included 1,120 parents, representing the recipients of education services, and 120 teachers, lecturers, and education sector experts. Parents… Read more

On Monday, Cambodia celebrated a National Day Against Human Trafficking, drawing attention not only to the challenges the country faces, but also to the strides that it has made in combatting trafficking. Last year, Cambodia implemented the first national action plan against trafficking and in June, the U.S. State Department’s annual Trafficking in… Read more

The High-Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment, created by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in January 2016, convened alongside the United Nations General Assembly in New York last month where it released its first-ever report. The panel was created to place women’s economic empowerment at the top of the global agenda and the 2030 Agenda for… Read more

Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of International Literacy Day and a half century later there’s much to celebrate. However, one of the persistent problems faced by schools in developing countries still today is a lack of one of the most essential ingredients to encourage reading: engaging children’s books to build literacy from an early age. In… Read more

By August, 1.5 million students across the Philippines attended 11th grade for the first time, thanks to the newly established senior high school (SHS), a cornerstone of the country’s long-running K-12 education reform efforts. The education reform debate leading up to this moment had been centered on whether or not to defer implementation of the K… Read more

India is one of the youngest countries in the world, with a significant segment of its 1.2 billion population in the age group of 20-35. By 2020, it is estimated that the average age in the country will be 29. For an economy that is growing at an annual rate of 7 percent…

Since the end of the socialist regime in the early 1990s, urban migration in Mongolia has continued to play an outsized role in the country’s evolving economic and social identity. With 45 percent of Mongolia’s traditionally nomadic population now living in Ulaanbaatar, public resources, especially those for schools and education, have been stretch… Read more

On October 11, global communities will mark the International Day of the Girl Child to celebrate girls’ rights and to recognize the achievements and shortcomings since the launch of the Millennium Development Goals…

The village of Tanou lies in a quiet corner of Cambodia, about 13 kilometers down a dusty road off National Highway 1 as you head towards the Mekong Delta from Phnom Penh. Trees provide a canopy of shade for most of the way to the village, beating back the blazing sun and screening the vast, partially flooded rice paddies that stretch to the horizon on either side.

This week in New York City, The Asia Foundation’s fifth annual Lotus Leadership Awards honored two acclaimed women leaders – women’s rights advocate Ranjana Kumari, director of India’s Centre for Social Research, and Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and author Sheryl WuDunn. In anticipation of the awards gala, In Asia spoke with Lotus Circle Advisor Janet Montag, a philanthropist and community leader widely traveled in Asia and a former trustee of the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh. We asked her what she thinks are the greatest challenges facing women in Asia today.

The women of Cambodia have made progress in education. From 2004 to 2012, the proportion of women to men in higher education grew from 29 to 38 percent. Yet, as these numbers also show, gender disparity in education persists in Cambodia

Two reports with ungainly titles and ostensibly nothing to do with each other were released by U.S. federal agencies last month. Together, these two reports should provoke a moment of reflection by anyone interested in the future of U.S. foreign policy.

It has been more than a century since the world first celebrated March 8 as International Women’s Day. This year also marks the 20th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women when representatives from 189 governments signed the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action…

The Asia Foundation marked its 60th anniversary with a special day-long event and gala on November 6 in Seoul, Korea, hosted by former Foreign Minister Han Sung-Joo…

Earlier this week, Cambodia’s Ministry of Education Youth and Sports (MoEYS) held a second high school exam to provide a second chance for the over 70 percent of 93,000 high school students who failed to pass the first annual national high school exam, held in early August. The passing rate in the first exam…

Khalid Malik, lead author of the UNDP Human Development Report, sat down with The Asia Foundation’s Global Communications assistant director, Eelynn Sim, on a recent visit to the Foundation’s headquarters in San Francisco and on the heels of the release of the 2014 report.

In Asia editor Alma Freeman sat down last month with The Asia Foundation’s new trustee, Donald Steinberg, president and CEO of World Learning, and former deputy administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development, White House Deputy Press Secretary, and U.S. ambassador to Angola.

Last week, Typhoon Rammasun (Glenda in the Philippines) swept through the Philippines, killing nearly 100 people and continued on its deadly path battering China and northern Vietnam. Just 24 hours after Glenda hit the Philippines, I visited Tacloban…

Publisher U Thant Thaw Kaung, head of the Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation and the mobile library project under the Daw Khin Kyi Foundation, recently visited The Asia Foundation’s headquarters in San Francisco as part of a three-week study tour…

By many metrics, Bangladesh’s development trajectory is a unique success story, especially since the 1990s when democratic rule was reinstated and extensive economic reforms were made. Poverty incidence has fallen from 60 percent to around 30 percent.

In Asia editor Alma Freeman recently interviewed Philippine local governance leader Marcia Czarina Corazon Medina-Guce on President Aquino’s ambitious reform agenda and progress on poverty reduction and inclusive development.

More than half of the 1.2 million residents of Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, live in the city’s sprawling ger areas, and the majority of residents lack access to basic public services such as water, sewage systems, electricity, and safe waste disposal, and educational resources including libraries.

Libraries and reading have a special place in Myanmar society. Yangon, the country’s largest city, is teeming with book vendors and libraries. The American Center and British Council libraries were venerated sources of up-to-date publications…

The Asia Foundation just released the first volume of a new discussion paper series that identifies subnational governance issues in Myanmar and how they inform policy and reform processes. Working together with the Myanmar Development Resource Institute’s Centre for Economic and Social Development, this first paper examines decentralization within… Read more

As a Canadian of Sri Lankan heritage, I am part of the growing diaspora living in the West who grew up speaking English as my first language. Since arriving in Sri Lanka as a LankaCorps Fellow I have been able to explore my “mother tongue,” taking lessons in both Tamil and Sinhala.