MONDULKIRI – Two trailblazing female graduates from the Institute of Technology of Cambodia (ITC) are breaking barriers in the gold mining industry.  They’re tackling key roles as a surveyor and a metallurgist at Renaissance Minerals (Cambodia) Ltd in Mondulkiri province, overcoming challenges related to gender and demanding work schedules.

Renaissance Minerals, a subsidiary of Australia’s Emerald Resources NL, employs nearly 700 Cambodians, including 60 women, at its gold mining site.  Around 90 employees are from overseas.

Chhun Thhey, originally from Battambang province, has been making her mark as a surveyor at the company since August 2023, after earning her bachelor’s degree.

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The post Gender No Barrier: Women Excel in Demanding Gold Mining Roles first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

Despite experiencing systematic social, economic and cultural marginalization, women like Noon, Dao Prasuk and Pornpimol remain determined to assert their communities’ rights to existence and to protect rivershed commons for generations to come, contesting the widespread public assumptions that large-scale hydropower and water diversion infrastructure are required to propel the region’s development forward, write Pai Deetes, Phairin Sohsai and Tanya L. Roberts Davis of International Rivers (IR)

This weekend, urban centres across the country and beyond will be the sites of public gatherings commemorating International Women’s Day, celebrating hard-won legal advances while raising collective consciousness of the gendered injustice amidst economic and resource disparities, migration, war and militarization. Less visible yet no less important to highlight are the day-to-day efforts being led by women to challenge violence against the rivers, land, Indigenous Peoples’ cultures, their bodies and their very rights to existence. At a time when we must confront the realities of the climate crisis, compounded by a race to blast, mine and clear sacred lands surrounding the Mekong and Salween Rivers, listening to, learning from and working in solidarity with women of riparian communities is imperative.

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The post From the Riverbanks of the Salween and Mekong to the Halls of Justice: Women Challenging Mainstream Assumptions and Asserting Collective Rights first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

Phnom Penh 12 December 2023. Women are vastly underrepresented in news stories produced by Cambodian media, with an exclusively women presence found only in 5% of all stories. In comparison, the stories that feature only men, make half of all the news published and broadcasted in Cambodian media. This is one the key findings of UNESCO’s report “Who makes the Cambodian news?”, an assessment of women’s presence and portrayal in Cambodian news, which was launched by UNESCO on 12 December 2023 in Phnom Penh. 

The report highlights that from all the spokespersons quoted as information sources in the news, just 2% are women. When interviewing specialized informants on a given topic, only 7% of the experts quoted in the news were women, and even when sourcing a general commentary from the public through “Vox-pops”, women’s opinions and voices made up just 12% of the citizens interviewed.

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The post Women are almost invisible in Cambodia’s news stories, UNESCO Report found  first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

KAMPONG CHHNANG PROVINCE — When Sopheap married in 2018 she was happy to settle down and start a family with her husband, and she gave birth to a son soon after. But within a few years, her marriage descended into domestic abuse after her husband became an alcoholic.

She faced regular beatings and insults by her husband, who works as a rattan basket maker in Kampong Chhnang province, and often had to stay with relatives together with her son to avoid abuse.

“Sometimes… I feel like I’ve run out of emotions and am almost crazy. It has been very difficult,” said Sopheap, adding that she had kept her family together for her son’s sake.

“If he keeps using violence and does not change, I only have the choice to divorce,” said the thin 43-year-old, who broke down in tears during a recent interview with VOA Khmer at her sister’s house in the province.

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The post Cambodian Women Vulnerable to Domestic Violence Due to Lack of Protection, Punishment first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

Fishing is what used to keep Nguyễn Thị Nga’s family afloat during the Mekong Delta’s flood season in the southern province of An Giang.

“We always filled buckets with fish, but now there are very few,” said the 44-year-old woman with a sigh. Money earned from selling the catch is “barely enough” to raise her three children and pay their tuition.

As climate change, upstream hydropower dams and intensive agriculture threaten traditional farming and fisheries in the Mekong Delta, women like Nga are struggling to find stable alternative livelihoods. Experts highlight their traditional gender roles and limited education and capital as hindrances to their ability to break free from a vicious cycle of vulnerability and precarity.

The rice fields in Nhơn Hội Commune, where Nga’s family live, used to be full of fish migrating from upstream during the flood season that lasts from September to November every year.

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The post The vanishing catch: How women are suffering in the Mekong Delta first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

The world’s largest refugee camp is no haven for women and girls. Previously viewed as a safe place of refuge from persecution in Myanmar, Rohingya women and girls face daily risks of violence and abuse. 

The Rohingya camps braced for, were hit, and have largely recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic. 

However, a pre-existing epidemic of gender-based violence (GBV) remains, silently permeating the tarpaulin households and bamboo structures of the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. 

“All girls are scared living in the camp. We don’t feel safe to go to school, to the tube-well, to visit anyone outside of the house, to go anywhere,” said Mehirma, a woman who lives in the camps. “Here there is no one to protect us. If anything bad happens, we are on our own.”

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The post Women in Rohingya camps face an epidemic of gender based violence first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

In an attempt to continue promoting young women’s rights and gender equality, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs led the commemoration of International Day of the Girl Child in the Kingdom in partnership with Plan International Cambodia.

The celebration presided over by Im Sithe, Secretary of State of Ministry of Women’s Affairs, in Phnom Penh has seen the presence of more than 100 participants, including government officials from relevant ministries and NGO partners yesterday.

Im Sithe said that the women deserve the opportunities to live their lives same as men, they have their own rights, decision-making powers and freedom. Therefore , the government considers protecting the women’s right, especially young girls’,  as top most priority to help them live their dreams.

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The post Girls, you are not alone in the fight for rights first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

Abortion is a global health issue, impacting individuals and families regardless of ethnicity, income, social status or nationality. Yet there is no worldwide legal standard for the practice of terminating a pregnancy. Lawmakers and governments hold sway over access to abortion, or its abolition.

In the United States, the Supreme Court’s 24 June decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the court’s 1973 ruling ensuring abortion rights, toppled nearly 50 years of U.S. legal precedent by granting power to individual states to make their own abortion laws. The change dismantled the national protection of abortion as a choice in cases of medical emergencies or unwanted pregnancies.

The court’s ruling was shocking to some in the moment of announcement, but also unsurprising to those who have watched the court’s rightward shift, which was cemented with the addition of three conservative justices appointed by former President Donald Trump and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The nine Supreme Court justices hold lifetime appointments and Trump was able to add Neil Gorsuch (2017), Brett Kavanaugh (2018) and Amy Coney Barrett (2020) following the deaths of Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the retirement of Anthony Kennedy. The new lineup gave the court’s conservative wing enough votes to discard the abortion precedent.

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The post Southeast Asia’s abortion laws reset at the borders first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

Nearly 6,000 people have fled their homes and approximately 25 have been killed in Kachin and northern Shan states by Myanmar’s regime forces from November 2021 to April, according to the rights group Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand (KWAT).

KWAT’s “New Threats from the Air” report on Wednesday said airstrikes and artillery were targeting civilian villages and rape was being used as a weapon, constituting war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The post Myanmar Junta’s War Crime Displaces Thousands of Civilians in Kachin State first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

Like many locals, Matthana Abhaimoon left rural Thailand to study in the city. Unlike most, she chose to come back – and fight for her right to farm in the forest as her forefathers had done.

After a 20-year campaign, residents of Mae Tha won a community forest title for their cluster of seven villages, joining a small but growing back-to-the-land movement that is luring young, eco-friendly farmers away from the city.

Under the order, she and about 5,000 villagers can farm some 3,500 acres (1,416 hectares) inside a protected forest in Mae Tha district, a mountainous region in northern Thailand which lies close to the region’s biggest city of Chiang Mai.

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The post Back to the land: Thai forest draws young, green farmers first appeared on Open Development Mekong.