Youth and Education.

At least one in five victims of drug-related killings in Metro Manila in 2016 and 2017 were beneficiaries of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), our field and database…

President Duterte has appointed a new election chairman and three commissioners — all of them from Mindanao. By 2022, Comelec will be run entirely by Duterte’s appointees. Mostly…

The procurement woes of the Comelec in the May 2019 elections had a backstory in an audit report the year prior. It continues to pay monthly rental for warehouse services without a…

Problems with procurement, logistics, supply chain management, tight implementation schedules, and bad — really bad — project management. A series of unfortunate events turned the…

Across the Philippines’ 81 provinces, from 30 to over 50 percent of voters failed to vote for party-list groups in May 2019. Many voters missed the names of party-list groups…

Secure and digital — two words that spell out what SD cards should exemplify. But in the May 2019 elections, 4,650 SD cards of the 85,769 units deployed were found to be defective…

Avoidable delays in the procurement of goods and services; the election calendar revised four times; wasteful spending on machines that conked out or were not used; massive…

Most of the candidates are from the administration-backed Hugpong ng Pagbabago (HNP) and the Liberal Party’s Otso Diretso. The number of candidates covered by the overview/scan…

In the bustling offshore gambling industry in the Philippines today, a conservative estimate of 100,000 people work. About 90 percent of them are mainland Chinese.

The biggest recipient of Chinese foreign direct investments in the Philippines these days is the online or offshore gambling industry.

WHEN PROVIDING Official Development Assistance or ODA, Western donors typically require the recipient states to adhere to international political norms, such as the ratification of…

THE YEAR 2019 marks the second decade of Indonesian media’s reform era. Although strongman Soeharto stepped down as president of Indonesia in 1998, it was only in 1999 that reforms…

TIMOR LESTE’S ranking in the latest press-freedom index of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) leaped by 11 places from the previous year, but those on the ground do not feel any…

IT WOULD be almost impossible to discuss media freedom in Vietnam without first reviewing the country’s political situation over the past year.

IN 2018 and early 2019, media freedom and the right to free expression came under sustained pressure in the Kingdom of Cambodia.

SINGAPORE’S media industry has long been tightly controlled by the government. This is unlikely to change in 2019; in fact, new legislation is expected that could further curb…

IT WAS April Fool’s Day when it was finally tabled for its first reading in Parliament, but the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill (POFMA) is no laughing…

IN APRIL 2018, during its last Parliamentary sitting as Government, the Barisan Nasional rushed through a law designed, according to its supporters, to curb the spread of “fake…

SHORTLY AFTER Malaysia’s historic 9 May 2018 elections, a new feeling of freedom had swept across the country, and even the most jaded of journalists were giddy with excitement…

IN DECEMBER 2018, Myanmar’s Minister for Information Pe Myint gave lie to global reports that offered a grim prognosis of press freedom in the former pariah state.

IT HAS just a little more than a year before its five-year term ends, but Myanmar’s ruling National League of Democracy (NLD) still has a lot of promises left unfulfilled.