UK - South East Asia Knowledge Partnership- 4th September (Deadline)

As part of the UK-Southeast Asia Knowledge Partnership, the Southeast Asia Science and Innovation team is seeking applicants for Collaborative Development Awards. Please see details here and get the application form: Funding to develop collaboration between partners in Southeast Asia and UK - News articles - GOV.UK

The awards are intended to support visits or short secondments by Southeast Asia researchers and policymakers to the UK, or vice versa, in order to develop specific proposals for future collaboration. Priority will be given to those proposals which are likely to lead to substantial collaboration and in which the potential outcomes of the activity would have a clear benefit for both the UK and Southeast Asia.

Each funding award is limited to £2000, which can be used to support travel and subsistence from Southeast Asia to the UK or vice versa. Policymakers and researchers from universities, research institutes and companies in the UK or Southeast Asia are eligible to apply. The awards are not intended to fund research itself, which would have to be supported by the usual national mechanisms.

To apply for this funding, please complete the application form and send it by e-mail to SEAsiaSI@fco.gov.uk by 4th September (which is extended from 23 August 2013).

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President approves law on Central Bank AutonomyOliver Slow

President U Thein Sein on Thursday last week signed a law that will give the Myanmar Central Bank more autonomy from the Ministry of Finance, opening the way for development of the country’s fledgling banking sector.

The new law is the latest in a series of economic and political reforms made by the quasi-civilian government led by U Thein Sein, aimed at opening up Myanmar’s economy to the international community who has taken keener interest in the country which isolated itself for about five decades.

The rules and regulations of the law had not been revealed at the time of writing this article, but the most notable point of the law is that the central bank will be given greater autonomy so that it can operate more like international central banks.

“The rules and regulations have already been drawn up. So we can expect them to emerge very soon,” Win Hteik, a senior central bank official, told Reuters. He said the governor and three deputy-governors would in future be nominated by the president and approved by parliament.

Tina Singhsacha, chief representative, Myanmar, Standard Chartered Bank, said the central bank stands as a key institution to steer the economy’s development in a stable manner.

“As a developing economy transits from a closed agricultural economy to a more industrialised and open country, a common negative byproduct is macroeconomic volatility,” Tina told Myanmar Business Today.

“Operational autonomy with proper accountability will help the central bank to become a stabilising force in the economy. A central bank’s functions, while largely focused on financial markets, is multi-faceted. The development of the Myanmar Central Bank will not just be crucial for the growth of the financial sector, but of the whole economy,” Tina added.

Currently, foreign banks are only allowed to open representative offices and more than 30 international banks including Standard Chartered, ANZ, Kasikorn Bank and CIMB have done so in order to make early moves into a market that is expected to offer high returns in the future.

Win Hteik told Reuters that the new law could include details of how joint-venture banks could be set up with foreign lenders.

The Central Bank of Myanmar was established as the Union Bank of Burma in 1947 and took over the functions of the Yangon branches of the Reserve Bank of India. It was established with an authorised capital of K40 million and paid up capital of K10 million by the government.

On its website, the Central Bank said its aim is “to preserve the internal and external value of the Myanmar Currency, the kyat.”

Helped by the International Monetary Fund, the central bank introduced a managed float of the kyat in April 2012 as part of the unification of the exchange rate system.

It first floated at 818 per dollar, a level in line with the black market at the time but which the IMF and economists said was overvalued. Since then, the kyat has fallen sharply and the central bank’s daily reference rate was set at 980 on Friday last week.

State-owned MRTV television reported the enactment by the president late on Thursday last week and said details would be published in newspapers next day. But there was nothing in any of last Friday’s papers, including the New Light of Myanmar, a state daily that carries official announcements.

© Myanmar Business Today myanmar business today

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ျမန္မာတစ္ႏုိင္ငံလံုးတြင္ ဟုိတယ္ ၈၃၄ လံုး ဖြင့္လွစ္ခြင့္ျပဳထားၿပီး မႏၲေလးတုိင္း ေဒသႀကီးတြင္ ဟုိတယ္ ၂၅၃ လံုး၊ အခန္း ၉၆၆၃ ခန္းျဖင့္ အမ်ားဆံုး ဖြင့္လွစ္ထား

ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္၏ အဓိက ခရီးသြားေဒသျဖစ္ေသာ အင္းေလးကန္မွ ဟုိတယ္တစ္လံုးကုိ ေတြ႕ရစဥ္ (ဓာတ္ပုံ-ေအာင္မ်ဳိးသန္႔)
ျမန္မာတစ္ႏုိင္ငံလံုးတြင္ ဟုိတယ္ ၈၃၄ လံုးအထိ ဖြင့္လွစ္ခြင့္ျပဳထားၿပီး ဇူလုိင္လကုန္ စာရင္းမ်ားအရ မႏၲေလးတုိင္း ေဒသႀကီးတြင္ ဟုိတယ္ ၂၅၃ လံုး၊ အခန္း ၉၆၆၃ ခန္းျဖင့္ အမ်ားဆံုး ဖြင့္လွစ္ထားကာ ရန္ကုန္တုိင္းေဒသႀကီးတြင္ ဟုိတယ္ ၂၁၃ လံုး၊ အခန္း ၉၂၉၄ ခန္းျဖင့္ ဒုတိယအမ်ားဆံုး ဖြင့္လွစ္ထားေၾကာင္း ဟုိတယ္ႏွင့္ ခရီးသြားလာေရးလုပ္ငန္း ၀န္ႀကီးဌာန၏ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္အရ သတင္းရရွိသည္။
ဖြင့္လွစ္ခြင့္ ျပဳထားသည့္ ျမန္မာတစ္ႏိုင္ငံလံုးရွိ ဟုိတယ္ ၈၃၄ လံုးတြင္ အခန္းေပါင္း ၃၀၄၀၁ ခန္းပါ၀င္ၿပီး ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္ အခန္းေပါင္း ၉၂၉၄ ခန္း ပါ၀င္ေသာ ဟုိတယ္ ၂၁၃ လံုး၊ မႏၲေလးၿမိဳ႕တြင္ အခန္းေပါင္း ၃၇၄၉ ခန္းပါ၀င္ေသာ ဟုိတယ္ ၈၇ လံုး၊ ေနျပည္ေတာ္တြင္ အခန္းေပါင္း ၂၅၃၇ ခန္းပါ၀င္ေသာ ဟုိတယ္အလံုး ၄၀၊ ပုဂံ-ေညာင္ဦးၿမိဳ႕တြင္ အခန္းေပါင္း ၂၃၅၁ ခန္း ပါ၀င္ေသာ ဟုိတယ္ ၇၆ လံုး၊ ေတာင္ႀကီးအင္းေလးတြင္ အခန္းေပါင္း ၁၇၄၂ ခန္းပါ၀င္ေသာ ဟုိတယ္ ၆၂ လံုးတုိ႔ကုိ ဖြင့္လွစ္ခြင့္ျပဳထားေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
ထုိ႔အတူ ခရီးလွည့္လည္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းလုိင္စင္ ၁၁၃၂ ခု၊ ပုိ႔ေဆာင္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းလုိင္စင္ ၁၉၀ ခုႏွင့္ ဧည့္လမ္းညႊန္ လုပ္ငန္းလုိင္စင္ ၃၃၄၃ ခုကုိလည္း ခြင့္ျပဳေပးခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
၂၀၁၃ ခုႏွစ္အတြင္း ႏုိင္ငံျခား ခရီးသြားဧည့္သည္ ၁ ဒသမ ၅ သန္းခန္႔ ၀င္ေရာက္မည္ဟု ခန္႔မွန္းထားၿပီး ခရီးသြားမ်ားျပားလာမႈေၾကာင့္ ဟုိတယ္ႏွင့္ ခရီးသြား ကုမၸဏီ လုပ္ငန္းလုိင္စင္မ်ားကုိ တုိးျမႇင့္ခြင့္ျပဳေပးေနေၾကာင္း သတင္းရရွိသည္။
၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ရန္ကုန္ေလဆိပ္မွ ႏုိင္ငံျခား ခရီးသြားဧည့္သည္ ေျခာက္သိန္းေက်ာ္ႏွင့္ နယ္စပ္အသီးသီးမွ ၀င္ေရာက္သူ ေလးသိန္းေက်ာ္ရွိၿပီး စုစုေပါင္း တစ္သန္းေက်ာ္ လာေရာက္ခဲ့သည္။ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသုိ႔ ႏုိင္ငံျခားခရီးသြား ၀င္ေရာက္မႈ ဆက္တုိက္ျမင့္တက္လ်က္ရွိၿပီး ယခုႏွစ္တြင္၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ ထက္ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္း ၄၀ ၀န္းက်င္ တုိးတက္၀င္ေရာက္မည္ဟု ဟုိတယ္ႏွင့္ ခရီးသြားလာေရးလုပ္ငန္း ၀န္ႀကီးဌာနက ခန္႔မွန္းထားသည္။
ဟုိတယ္မ်ားကုိ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈနယ္ေျမမ်ားႏွင့္ ခရီးသြားမ်ားကုိ ဆဲြေဆာင္ႏုိင္သည့္ ေဒသမ်ားတြင္ အဓိက ဖြင့္လွစ္ထားျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး ျမန္မာတစ္ႏုိင္ငံလံုးရွိ ဟုိတယ္အခန္း အေရအတြက္၏ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္း ၉၀ သည္ မႏၲေလးတုိင္းေဒသႀကီး၊ ရန္ကုန္တုိင္းေဒသႀကီး၊ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္၊ ဧရာ၀တီတုိင္းေဒသႀကီး၊ ပဲခူးတုိင္းေဒသႀကီးႏွင့္ ရခုိင္ျပည္နယ္တုိ႔တြင္ ဖြင့္လွစ္ထားျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
၂၀၁၃ ခုႏွစ္ ဇူလုိင္ ၁ ရက္အထိ ဟုိတယ္ႏွင့္ ခရီးသြားက႑တြင္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသားမ်ား၏ ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံမႈသည္ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁၈၃ ဒသမ ၃၄ ဘီလ်ံေက်ာ္အထိ ရွိလာေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ ထုိ႔အတူ ဟုိတယ္ႏွင့္ ခရီးသြားက႑တြင္ ႏုိင္ငံျခားဟုိတယ္ ၄၇ ခုရွိၿပီး အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁၅၈၅ ဒသမ ၈၁၁ သန္း ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံထားကာ စုစုေပါင္း ႏုိင္ငံျခားရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံမႈ ပမာဏ၏ ၃ ဒသမ ၆၉ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းရွိေၾကာင္း သတင္းရရွိသည္။     ဒီေနရာကကူးယူးထားသည္

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Myanmar to implement rural development program

Myanmar's Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries will join hands with local and foreign businessmen to implement a rural development program, according to officials. 

Minister Ohn Myint made the announcement during a meeting with governmental bodies, NGOs, businessmen and experts in Myanmar Peace Centre on August 17.

"The policy of Rural Development Department cooperated with the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries is development for socio-economic life of rural people. That’s why we are going to distribute 49 enterprises to local and foreign firms," said Minister Ohn Myint.               ဒီေနရာကကူးယူထားသည္

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Tomás Quintana speaking at a press conference in Yangon International Airport

Myanmar is moving forward despite facing critical challenges in national reconciliation and human rights according to U.N. envoy.

U.N. special rapporteur Tomás Quintana was speaking at a press conference to mark the end of his 10-day mission on August 21 at Yangon International Airport.

"Myanmar is moving forward in a significant number of areas, which has brought positive changes to the human rights situation, and has the potential to bring further improvements. However, there are still critical challenges, including the historical need of reconciliation with ethnic groups," said Quintana in his closing remarks.

Quintana visited numerous regions and met with ministers, local officials, civil society organisations as well as citizens, ethnic groups and political prisoners. This is his eighth visit to Myanmar as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights.

The U.N special envoy raised an incident in Meiktila when crowds descended on his car on Monday punching and kicking the windows as the police stood back. He highlighted the government's obligation to take action against violent mobs and to hold accountable those who fail to do their duty.

"The fear that I felt during this incident, being left totally unprotected by the nearby police, gave me an insight into the fear residents would have felt when being chased down by violent mobs during the violence last March as police allegedly stood by as angry mobs beat, stabbed and burned to death some 43 people," said Quintana.

Quintana visited many areas that were affected by communal violence in 2012 and earlier this year including Rakhine State. Protestors confronted the U.N envoy when he arrived in Sittwe claiming that the he was ignoring the concerns of Buddhist Rakhine residents.

While he lauded the government’s efforts to work with the international community to address the humanitarian needs of both Rakhine Buddhists and Muslims, he also criticised the severe restrictions placed on IDP camps and villages.

"I visited Aung Mingalar, the only remaining Muslim ward in Sittwe, where a large number of people are living in a confined space, with the periphery marked out with barbed wire and guarded by armed police. This has serious consequences for fundamental human rights," said the U.N envoy.

"My overriding concern is that the separation and segregation of communities in Rakhine State is becoming increasingly permanent, making the restoration of trust difficult," he added.

Quintana commended President Thein Sein for his efforts to secure the release of all remaining political prisoners by the end of this year and hoped to see the promise realised.

He finally thanked the Myanmar Government for its invitation and cooperation, reaffirming his willingness to work with Myanmar during its transition to improve the human rights of its people.

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ေငြက်ပ္ ၁၅ဝဝ တန္ ဖုန္းလုိင္း ကတ္မ်ား ျပင္ပ ေပါက္ေစ်း ျမင့္ေနေသာ္လည္း ေစ်းကြက္ အတြင္း ေရာင္းခ်ရန္ ကတ္ ျပတ္လပ္ လ်က္ရွိ

ရန္ကုန္  ၾသဂုတ္  ၂၂

ရန္ကုန္ ၿမိဳ႕တြင္းရွိ မိုဘိုင္းလ္ဖုန္း ဆုိင္မ်ားတြင္ ေငြက်ပ္ ၁၅ဝဝ တန္ တန္ဖုိးနည္း ဖုန္းမ်ားျဖစ္သည့္ CDMA 800MHz ႏွင့္ GSM လိုင္းကတ္မ်ားမွာ ျပင္ပေပါက္ေစ်း အျမင့္ဆံုး ရွိေနေသာ္လည္း

ေစ်းကြက္အတြင္း ေရာင္းခ်ရန္ ကတ္မရွိေလာက္ေအာင္ ျပတ္လပ္လ်က္ ရွိေၾကာင္း ဖုန္း ေရာင္းဝယ္ေရး ေစ်းကြက္ အတြင္းမွ စံုစမ္း သိရသည္။ ၾသဂုတ္ ပထမပတ္ႏွင့္ ဒုတိယပတ္တြင္ ေငြက်ပ္ ၁၅ဝဝ တန္ ဖုန္းလိုင္းကတ္မ်ား ဝယ္လို အားႏွင့္ ေရာင္းလိုအား ျမင့္တက္ခဲ့ၿပီး ယခုအခါ ေစ်းကြက္အတြင္း CDMA 800MHz ႏွင့္ GSM လုိင္းကတ္ မ်ားမရွိသေလာက္ ရွားေနေၾကာင္း ယင္းကာလအ တြင္း ေငြက်ပ္ ႏွစ္သိန္းတန္ GSM လိုင္းကတ္မ်ားကို ျပန္လည္ ေရာင္းခ်ျခင္းမ်ားလည္း ပိုမို မ်ားျပားခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

''ဆုိင္တုိင္းမွာ လိုင္းကတ္ ေရာင္းစရာမရွိ ျဖစ္ေနတယ္။ ရွိတဲ့ဆုိင္ အနည္းအက်ဥ္းကလည္း ေစ်းကို ပိုျမႇင့္ၿပီး ေရာင္းခ် ေနၾကတယ္။ ဝယ္ယူသူေတြကလည္း ဘယ္ေစ်းပဲ ျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ဝယ္ေနၾကတာပါပဲ'' ဟု ယုဇနပလာဇာ အနီးရွိ မုိဘိုင္းလ္ဖုန္း အေရာင္းဆိုင္မွ မန္ေနဂ်ာ တစ္ဦးက ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။

ျပင္ပေစ်းကြက္ အတြင္း ေငြက်ပ္ ၁၅ဝဝ တန္ CDMA 800MHz လိုင္းကတ္ တစ္ကတ္လွ်င္ ေငြက်ပ္ ၈ဝဝဝဝ မွ ေငြက်ပ္ ၉၅ဝဝဝ အထိ ေစ်းျမင့္လ်က္ရွိၿပီး မၾကာမီေသးက ထြက္ရွိသည့္ တန္ဖိုးနည္း ေငြက်ပ္ ၁၅ဝဝ တန္ ဖုန္းလိုင္း GSM ကတ္ တစ္ကတ္လွ်င္ ေငြက်ပ္ တစ္သိန္းခြဲ အထိ ေစ်းႏႈန္းရွိေၾကာင္း စာခ်ဳပ္ႏွင့္ မွတ္ပံုတင္ မိတၱဴ ရွိပါက အေရာင္းအဝယ္ ျဖစ္ၾကေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

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SPA, Yoma Strategic unveil ‘landmark’ project for Yangon

The former Ministry of Railways head office and the surrounding 10 acres in Yangon will be transformed into a US$350-million mixed use “landmark” project, a spokesperson for the company planning the project said last week.
Serge Pun and Associates (SPA), in conjunction with Singapore-listed Yoma Strategic Holdings, announced on November 20 that it would redevelop the company’s 10-acre plot, which houses FMI Centre, Grand Mee Ya Hta Hotel and a heritage-listed building, into a 2-million-square-foot mixed-use residential, commercial, retail and hospitality project at the heart of Yangon’s central business district.
Cyrus Pun, SPA group’s director responsible for real estate development , told The Myanmar Times on November 28 that the Grand Mee Ya Hta Hotel would be demolished, while the former Burma Railways Headquarters building would be restored and developed into a 5-star hotel that will form the centrepiece of the project.
“It’s a great location and will become a landmark of Yangon when it’s completed,” Mr Pun said, adding that the company is in the process of seeking Myanmar Investment Commission (MIC) approval for the project.
“We are blessed with a fantastic location – we are right by Bogyoke Market where we can get the most traffic, we have an historical building on site – it’s one of the 180-odd heritage listed sites in Yangon under the Heritage Trust, and I’d say it’s one of the more prominent ones,” he said.
Assuming Yoma Strategic’s shareholders approve the proposed transaction the project will be owned by MIC-approved Meeyahta International Hotel Limited (MIHL), a joint venture between SPA as the Myanmar partner and Yoma Strategic as the foreign partner, which announced its intention on November 19 to buy an 80 percent interest in MIHL with the associated rights to participate in the development of the 10-acre site, a Yoma Strategic press release dated November 20 said.
Yoma will pay $81.28 million for the shares in MIHL, the release added. http://www.mmtimes.com/index.php/business/property-news/3452-spa-yoma-strategic-unveil-landmark-project-for-yangon.html

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