The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Global Initiatives, Singapore will welcome over 600 business & sustainability leaders, senior government officials, UN agencies, NGOs from across the globe for the Responsible Business Forum on Sustainable Development (RBF) in Singapore on 22-24 November 2016.

As Cambodia crosses the threshold into the middle income country category, government intervention in education is highly justified and desirable to avoid the so called ‘Middle Income Trap’ also called ‘low skills trap’ by ...

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Asia-Pacific Development Effectiveness Facility (AP-DEF) opened a two-day meeting on aid ahead of the upcoming Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation. More than 100 government delegates and development experts are exploring how to design integrated national financing frameworks for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Asia-Pacific. “Domestic sources of finance are emerging as a key driving force for sustainable development in Asia-Pacific,” said Haoliang Xu, UN Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Director for Asia and the Pacific. “These new sources of finance allow us to expand the existing development cooperation and partnership.”

To attain environmental sustainability and sustain Cambodia’s path to development, it is therefore more than timely that the government has recently decided to initiate an environmental governance reform...

If the returns to labour are to be increased, Cambodia will need to diversify the economy providing productive employment opportunities for the 275,000 youths reaching the working age population annually (ILO, 2008). It also needs to make agriculture more productive to provide higher returns to labour to young people who would remain employed in rural jobs. Lastly, there is a need to enhance long-term savings to build-up financial assets and strengthen household resilience and set the foundations for inclusive and sustainable economic growth...

But the term ‘gold’ should also be used for another important resource in Cambodia — water. Water is central to agricultural production including paddy rice, through the expansion of irrigation...

Through the development of an Environmental Code, the reform is expected to provide overarching principles and a legal framework to guide implementation of existing laws, in order to achieve sustainable natural resource management and development. Through the support for the integrated ecosystem mapping, existing data on environment and development will be consolidated to assist national level land use planning and decisions for sustainable landscape management...

Despite its reclassification as a Lower Middle-Income Country, Cambodia’s transition from a Least Developed Country will take perhaps another ten years while its human asset and economic vulnerability indices remain within the LDC category..

To expand the scope for public action, UNDP will focus assistance on public institutions for poverty reduction and resilience and on strengthening voice and participation. The focus will be on upgrading value chains, financing development sustainably, building resilience and fostering participation. An important tool will be fostering partnerships in the context of transition.

The 2015 Human Development Report ‘Work for Human Development’ examines the links, both positive and negative, between work and human development in a rapidly changing world of work.