Maldives

Globally, 100 countries have enacted right to information (RTI) legislation guaranteeing citizens the right to access information and records held by their governments. Over the last decade, South Asian countries have made significant progress toward recognizing this right.

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 Maldives is an archipelago known foremost for its pristine beaches, exclusive resorts, and a vacation hideaway for the super-rich. In development circles the country is better known as a laboratory for all things climate-change related. Tourism and fishing have brought significant income…

All eyes were on Kathmandu last week as Nepal hosted the 18th annual SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) Summit from Nov. 22-27, 2014. The annual meeting, convening the heads of state of the eight member nations…

Asia’s rise has been momentous. Since the early 1960s, Asia has grown richer faster than any other region in the world. In 1990, 56 percent of people in East Asia and 54 percent in South Asia lived on under $1.25 a day (PPP). By 2010, these rates had fallen to 12 percent and 31 percent…

On June 5, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) will focus its World Environment Day campaign around “Raise Your Voice, Not the Sea Level” to draw attention to the issue of rising oceans worldwide. Sea level rise is an inevitable consequence of the overall increase…

The Maldives – a stretch of islands in the Indian Ocean – is mostly known for its sandy white beaches and crystal clear oceans. Not surprisingly, tourism is the largest contributor to the island chain’s GDP and drives this popular perception. However, despite its undeniable beauty, healthy GDP growth of more than 8 percent…

At the opening day of the South Asia Women Parliamentarians’ Conference in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Dr. Miria Matembe, former member of parliament from Uganda, voiced an increasingly common theme: “The issue of women’s participation in politics is no longer in contention. What is central to the debate now is how to make their participation effective enough to influence the governance agenda and make it responsive to women’s interests, needs, and concerns.” But, despite what seems like a growing consensus around this idea, still just 19.5 percent of the world’s parliamentarians are women.

South Asia has seen remarkable economic growth since the 1980s, when the region began to adopt pro-growth policies such as foreign investment liberalization, privatization, and the dismantling of onerous business regulations. Since the mid-1980s, South Asia experienced an average annual growth rate of 5.6 percent in its per capita Gross National In… Read more

International climate negotiations began this week in Cancun, Mexico, with little fanfare or expectation of reaching a binding agreement on reducing rising global temperatures. The Cancun Summit builds on last year’s disappointing but massive Copenhagen climate talks in Denmark. Since then, governments have done little to follow through on their pl… Read more

There is an instant before the start of a large event when, with logistical arrangements set and the agenda fine tuned, attention shifts to participants. One draws a breath and wonders what the chemistry of personalities, perspectives, and experience will yield. So I reflected at the start of last week’s regional conference on the role of leaders o… Read more

Upon their return from the Leaders of Influence (LOI) regional conference in Dhaka March 21-24 that convened over 80 participants from 14 countries, In Asia spoke with Rosita MacDonald, program officer for The Asia Foundation’s Governance, Law, and Civil Society program, and Russell Pepe, chief of party for the LOI program in Bangladesh, on what th… Read more

When President Obama declared in his Cairo speech last year “Americans are ready to join with citizens and governments, community organizations, religious leaders, and businesses in Muslim communities around the world to help our people pursue a better life,” a new sense of optimism charged those dedicated to building bridges between the two commun… Read more