ASEAN

ASEAN continues to make steady progress across the Sustainable Development Goals, with notable gains in poverty reduction, health outcomes, education access, and digital connectivity.

A decade of ASEAN Community-building reflects steady, adaptive progress achieved through unity, resilience, and institutional maturity.

Placing women and girls at the centre of ASEAN’s development, the Philippines’ 2026 ASEAN Chairship underscores their role as leaders and active partners in advancing gender equality.

Designed to bridge varying levels of institutional readiness across ASEAN, the Attachment Officer (AO) Programme has become a cornerstone of ASEAN–Japan cooperation in advancing regional integration.

ASEAN Community-building—spanning political security, economic progress, connectivity, and socio-cultural development—has always placed people at its core.

Under the Philippines’ SAIL-ASEAN economic agenda, ASEAN’s 2026 programme is geared toward delivering concrete and measurable outcomes in line with the ASEAN Community Vision 2045.

Over the past decade of implementing the ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint 2025, Southeast Asia has made significant strides toward a more integrated, dynamic, and globally connected economy.

A decade of progress in the ASEAN Political-Security Community has helped keep the region peaceful, secure, and stable amid intensifying global and regional geopolitical, economic, and emerging non-traditional tensions and challenges.

ASEAN's record over the past decade is one of steady, adaptive progress, achieved under genuinely difficult conditions and within a consensus-based structure that must reconcile the diverse interests of sovereign nations.

Now available: The ASEAN Magazine Issue No. 51-52: “A Decade of Progress: The Making of the ASEAN Community”. Read the full issue: theaseanmagazine.asean.org Cover art by Phonepaserth PHIMSAVANN (Bee)

Southeast Asia’s waters are among the most ecologically and economically important in the world.

Human cases often reveal only part of the story. By tracking animal health, environmental conditions, and spillover risks, One Health surveillance strengthens outbreak preparedness before threats escalate.

ASEAN’s biodiversity supports millions of lives and places the region among the world’s most ecologically significant.

When biodiversity is disrupted, the consequences reach far beyond ecosystems. They can emerge as new health risks, zoonotic disease outbreaks, and fragile food systems.

ASEAN Heritage Parks are “protected areas of high conservation importance, preserving in total a complete spectrum of representative ecosystems of the ASEAN region.”

ASEAN Heritage Parks are doing vital work for biodiversity, climate resilience, and community-centred conservation. In Viet Nam, the Eighth ASEAN Heritage Parks Conference showed how regional collaboration can help turn global biodiversity goals into practical action.

As a child in Xayaboury, Lao PDR, Souphalak Phongsavath often wondered how the fresh cow dung she passed on her way to school each morning could disappear by afternoon.

Now available: The ASEAN Magazine Issue Nos. 49-50, ASEAN’s Roots and Reefs: Nature’s Strongholds.

Founded in 2009 in Hoi An, Viet Nam, STREETS International runs a free 14-month culinary and hospitality training program for disadvantaged youth aged 17 to 25.