PanNature

The US embassy in Hanoi has provided almost $40,000 to two local organizations for projects to support women’s rights and environmental journalists.

Ambassador Michael W. Marine presented the grants to the Center for Promotion of Education and Empowerment of Women (CEPEW) and People and Nature Reconciliation (PanNature) at a ceremony in Hanoi Friday.

The CEPEW, together with the Women’s Union in the northern Ha Nam Province, has been selected to implement a $19,962 program to strengthen the role of women in politics and decision-making in the province’s Duy Tien dis­trict.

A grant of $19,965 to PanNature, a non-profit organization, is meant for a project to pro­mote equal access to the country’s natural resources, particularly by disadvantaged communities, through an independent online media.

Both projects will run until June 2008.

Source: The US Embassy in Hanoi

From 26 to 27 July 2007, Transparency International hosted the Asia Pacific Corruption in Forestry Program Development Workshop in Bangkok, Thailand. The Workshop aimed to bring together a group of key forestry and corruption stakeholders in the region to share experiences, learn from each other, and initiate a cooperative process to lay out the foundations of a Regional Program on Forestry and Corruption to address the prevalence of corruption in the harvesting, processing, and trade of timber in Asia Pacific.

Participants included forestry governance, illegal logging and corruption experts and practitioners representing local and regional organizations and TI National Chapters. Countries represented included Australia, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, PNG, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Participants from Solomon Islands and Taiwan sent apologies.

Trinh Le Nguyen, PanNature’s Executive Director, also joined this workshop as one of representatives from Vietnam.

Workshop Report can be downloaded from here >>