Friends-International Blog

This week has seen Friends Board Members, Program Directors, International Coordinators, managers and staff from across the world gathering together in Phnom Penh at the FI HQ building for our annual sharing meeting. This is a rare opportunity for us all to get together, to share our achievement from the previous year and to look [...]

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Cambodian Sihanoukville-based NGO M’Lop Tapang is a long standing Friends CYTI Alliance partner.  Within the CYTI Alliance, sharing of best practice is a key outcome for Alliance members. So it was with great excitement that our Friends-International Peuan Peuan (Thailand) program team based in Bangkok said ‘welcome’ this week to a team from M’Lop Tapang [...]

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(This post from our new Cambodia Communications Officer, Menghourng Ngo) Last Friday morning at Club Friends Mith Samlanh hosted the Parent Representatives Selection which aims to find excellent and talented messengers to transfer information between communities and Mith Samlanh . The event was really busy -  81 parents came from different communities across the city [...]

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  On Thusday 19th July, Mot Srors, an 18 year old woman from Lor village in the  Samroung Tong District of Khompong Speu Province, Cambodia went to the Thnal Torteng Market in the District. She went there by motorbike, driven by another young woman who worked at the same shoe factory where Mot Srors was [...]

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Vuthaya Charoenpol (Ann) is the Country Program Director of the Friends Peuan Peuan program in Thailand. She is based in Bangkok, but in our ‘story from the field’ from her today, we travel with her on one of her frequent visits to the Aran Project, on the border between Thailand and Cambodia. Visiting Peuan Peuan [...]

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We’ve been asked many times for our thoughts on ‘soup kitchen’ projects which provide free food to street children. Although often set up with best intentions and supported by people who really want to do good, there are many areas of real concern in what they are doing. How do we know? Because we’ve been [...]

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Coinciding with International Children’s Day, we are delighted to announce the online launch of the Friends-International Annual Report 2011 on June 1st 2012. Reaching out to over 55,000 individuals during 2011, the report details the global impact of the four programs powered by Friends-International – Friends Programs, the CYTI Alliance, the ChildSafe Network and Friends [...]

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The World Economic Forum (WEF) in Bangkok is certainly in the news at the moment, and amongst the many issues that delegates will be discussing and debating is the impact of the massive expansion of tourism in Asia, and South East Asia in particular. During the WEF  a debate on this subject ( ‘What is [...]

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Noulin is proud to be a ChildSafe tuk tuk driver who has directly helped children who were at risk. One morning he saw two girls aged 13 and 14 looking lost on the streets of Phnom Penh. They seemed very upset and distressed. Because of his ChildSafe training, Noulin realized that they were in a [...]

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It’s Valentines Day! Near our headquarters in Phnom Penh the streets are full of (mainly young) vendors selling flowers, cuddly toys and other love-themed trinkets from brightly decorated makeshift stalls to  students and young people who mill around excitedly, giggling shyly at their purchases from behind their hands. Pink is everywhere – all we need [...]

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