The men and women displaced by the ongoing conflict in Kachin and living in camps for internally displace people (IDP) are struggling with a lack of employment and livelihood. With nothing but an assistance of 11,000 Myanmar Kyat (US$7) for each family’s monthly food budget through the World Food Programme (WFP) Cash-for-Food programme, life has been hard. The continuously rising food prices makes the monthly food budget insufficient to feed an average family.

Surrounded by severely damaged coral reefs, the fishers of Indonesia’s Seraya Besar, off the west coast of Flores, struggle to make ends meet. Year-on-year fish stocks have shrivelled as the damaged reef can only support limited life.

Investigators are beginning the grim task of determining why a brand-new Boeing 737 Max jet flown by Indonesia’s Lion Air plunged into the Java Sea minutes after take-off, killing all 189 people on board.Divers are searching for submerged wreckage of the plane, along with flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders documenting the aircraft’s final moments.

Indonesia's quake-tsunami battered city of Palu is facing a public health crisis as torrential rains threaten to spread malaria and dengue fever to the devastated region a month after the disaster, aid agencies have warned.On 28 September, a magnitude 7.5 quake and a subsequent tsunami razed swathes of Palu on Sulawesi island, killing some 2,200 people and displacing more than 220,000.Thousands more are missing, presumed dead, after entire neighbourhoods were swallowed up by liquefaction

When the progress towards achieving the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as of 2017 was assessed earlier this year, the situation had worsened most significantly for the Southeast Asia sub-region when it came to containing the loss of land area covered by natural forest.

Tourists landed by the boatload Friday on the Philippines' Boracay island, which re-opened with a slew of new rules after a six-month shutdown aimed at undoing the impact of years of being loved to death by millions of holidaymakers.President Rodrigo Duterte shuttered the tiny white-sand island in April, declaring it a "cesspool" where businesses flushed raw sewage into the once pristine turquoise waters and trash soiled its beaches.Among the first to land after the government

Early this year, Indonesia’s Minister of Finance, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, received the Best Minister Award at the World Government Summit in Dubai. This award is based on a country’s tangible achievements in reducing poverty, improving living standards, reducing public debt and boosting transparency in public transactions.

In a world with warmer atmospheric temperature, the already observed changes to the climate are expected to further worsen, resulting in increasingly more frequent and intense weather events. For vulnerable Southeast Asians living in disaster-prone conditions, climate-related events will not only continue to dominate the risk landscape, but also threaten to undo their hard-earned economic development.

The battle to establish Marawi as a wilayat or provincial territory by the ISIL-affiliated Maute-Abu Sayyaf group and the ensuing firefights to liberate the city by the Philippine government security forces was declared over by President Rodrigo Duterte, on 17 October, 2017. The five-month conflict claimed the lives of 920 militants, 165 government security troops and 47 civilians, while 1,780 hostages were rescued during the crisis.

In the olden days, women across Lao PDR inherited their weaving skills from their mothers, mostly for their own use. Weaving was also a communal activity, allowing for social interaction with other women in their communities. With the advent of mass-produced industrial textiles, the traditional art of silk and cotton weaving has been pushed back mainly into the domain of healing rituals and ceremonial purposes.