Expert Opinions & Stories

The rapid growth of digitalization has fundamentally altered commerce, impacting production and facilitating the movement of goods. The 2023 Asia-Pacific Trade and Investment Report (APTIR), has…

The summer of 2024 has shattered heat records, starkly illustrating the harsh realities of our warming planet. In India alone, the heatwave has claimed over 100 lives and caused more than 40,000…

The Asia-Pacific region is faltering on decades of progress in reducing poverty and hunger. Increasingly, severe climate-related hazards are threatening food security and triggering human…

For Shristi Shrestha, in addition to the challenges of registering her business and accessing finance, a major challenge she has had to overcome as a woman entrepreneur has been that of societal…

Scientific assessments reveal that the Third Pole (TP), encompassing the vast glaciated mountain systems of Asia, is warming at an alarming rate of over 0.3 ºC per decade, surpassing the global…

33-year old Laom Ry started her roadside noodle shop with just US$20 – the sum of the monthly rent she pays for the small plot of land on the outskirts of Siem Reap City, Cambodia.  Alongside…

33-year-old Rina Akhtar, hailing from Dhaka, Bangladesh, found herself grappling with adversity when her husband deserted her, leaving her to raise their two daughters alone.

Undeterred by the…

In 2019, Sonika Manandhar and Tiffany Tong teamed up to found Aloi – a Kathmandu-based fintech company that supports informal micro entrepreneurs in Nepal to overcome difficulties in accessing formal…

The demand for adopting more inclusive value chains in the private sector is apparent on all fronts. Customers are more mindful of their purchases, with extensive access to product information…

The ESCAP Asia-Pacific SDG Progress Report 2024 flagged the region’s regression on SDG 13, climate action. To reverse this trend, it is imperative that both mitigation and adaptation go hand in hand…

Ponny Lim runs a thriving aquaculture enterprise in Cambodia, growing her business with the support of a United Nations programme that guarantees loans to women entrepreneurs who are beyond…

Globally, it is estimated that over 70 per cent of women-owned businesses are either financially underserved or unserved. This gender finance gap deprives women and women-led businesses of crucial…

2023 was the warmest year on record. The latest Copernicus Climate Change Service highlights that February 2023 to January 2024 was the first time that we experienced 12 consecutive months of…

In the heart of India's agricultural landscape, smallholder farmers, comprising 70 per cent of the sector, face a significant barrier: limited access to formal financial institutions and resources…

In the bustling financial hub of Singapore, Rhea See, an early-stage fund manager, leads an accelerator platform dedicated to empowering women in technology. She firmly believes that investing in…

On 12/13 November 1970, the world’s deadliest tropical cyclone ‘Bhola’ killed more than 300,000 people in Bangladesh. The hard lesson learnt from ‘Bhola’ was not having an effective cyclone warning…

The potential of e-commerce to drive inclusive development has been debated for decades. As far back as 2002, then-United Nations Secretary-General Kofi A. Annan, in the publication titled E-Commerce…

On 4 October 2023, a cloudburst over Lhonak Lake in North Sikkim  triggered a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) in the Teesta river basin, which claimed over 30 lives, destroyed the 1,200 MW…

The New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration was unanimously adopted during the G20 Leader’s Summit on 9-10 September 2023. It has many takeaways covering a variety of pressing global challenges, including…

Gulmira Kuzhagaliyeva, a former senior expert at Qaz-Trade, Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Trade and Integration, has been exploring sustainable methods of food packaging and storage in her work  ̶…