As regulations lag behind online connectivity, cyber-crimes are growing across the region’s digital landscape causing significant economic losses to government agencies, financial institutions and educational websites. Fraudsters exploit social media to connect young people with online abuse networks, where non-consensual intimate content and child sexual exploitation materials are viewed, distributed, and monetized. Young jobseekers are lured by criminal groups through fake employment opportunities linked to cyber scam operations. Local communities can spearhead resilience to rapidly changing cyber-crimes through educational awareness and support networks.

Humanitarian Services for Children of Vietnam (HSCV), Vietnam

Humanitarian Services for Children of Vietnam (HSCV) is working directly with vulnerable schools in Ha Noi to incorporate digital safety models into existing curricula, increasing children’s online safety. By prioritizing teachers, HSCV is investing in one of the most consistent and trusted relationships in a child’s life, empowering them to implement interactive lessons that can reduce children’s risk of cyber-enabled exploitation. HSCV’s project employs a strengths-based, systemic approach that engages schools and local authorities in a ‘transfer of ownership’ strategy. This helps ensure that interventions are integrated into local policy and culture, reducing children’s risk of exploitation and vulnerability to organized crime.

Child Helpline Cambodia, Cambodia

Child Helpline Cambodia (CHC) is training youth in digital literacy and critical life skills. The programme is designed to create a safer digital environment and empower young people to act as frontline defenders against digital threats, including organized exploitation and cyber-enabled fraud and online scams. By supporting youth peer support groups, CHC fosters self-protection, prevention and resilience among youth.

Communities across the Mekong region are often the first to experience the impacts of drug trafficking, but too rarely are they included in shaping the responses. The rise of synthetic drugs has increased the trafficking of precursor chemicals and the growth of production facilities. The mushrooming of cannabis dispensaries across Thai neighbourhoods has opened new smuggling routes passing into international markets. Drug production and trafficking do not only affect border crossings like Mae Hong Son in Thailand or Sop Hun and Lao Cai in Vietnam, they affect communities in coastal cities like Nha Trang, urban areas like Bangkok, and special economic zones like Sithandone. When civil society organisations are strengthened, they can improve trust and local ownership to safeguard against harm.

Southeast Asia Harm Reduction Association (AHRA), Thailand

The Southeast Asia Harm Reduction Association (AHRA) is driving rights-based harm reduction strategies. AHRA actively builds resilience among at-risk communities by leading a cross-regional network of monitoring initiatives aimed at identifying health risks early, including changing drug purities and difficulties accessing medical services. Many of the communities that AHRA works with experience multiple forms of vulnerability, including poverty, social exclusion, limited access to services, stigma, discrimination, and in some contexts exploitation linked to broader illicit economies and criminal networks.

By providing trusted information and leading community-monitoring mechanisms, AHRA strengthens community resilience, reduces health and social harms, and supports more informed, rights-based, and community-led responses to changing drug market environments.

Community Health and Inclusion Association (CHIAs), Laos

Community Health and Inclusion Association (CHIAs) addresses the root causes of youth criminality through peer-led support networks, digital learning and strengthened social service coordination in Laos. CHIAs aims to prevent and disrupt cycles of crime by stopping at-risk youth from entering criminal activity in the first place and by countering recidivism. At the system level, CHIAs strengthens coordination mechanisms across civil society organizations and government agencies, resulting in improved referral pathways and a more cohesive youth crime prevention framework. At the family level, CHIAs facilitates workshops and activities to strengthen community-based resilience within and across crime-affected communities. These resilience-building efforts aim to reduce youth involvement in crime, foster safer communities and improve long-term social and economic outcomes for young people.

Human trafficking remains a significant and complex issue. Victims, including adults and children, are trafficked for forced labour, forced criminality and sexual exploitation, both domestically and abroad. Criminal networks have trafficked hundreds of thousands of victims from more than 77 countries across the globe to conduct cyber scams in industrial scale operations – often recruiting victims through fraudulent employment schemes. Women and girls are frequently trafficked from poorer Mekong nations into China for forced marriages. Civil society initiatives in criminal hotspots can support in neighbourhood watches, and local advocacy groups that complement the referral systems and service provision through legal advice, health care, education or vocational training, financial assistance, and accommodation.

Planète Enfants & Développement (PE&D), Vietnam

Planète Enfants & Développement (PE&D) is strengthening resilience capacities of frontline professionals to systematically identify risks and manage social cases in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. PE&D’s family accompaniment approach addresses a service gap created by economic precarity and the frequent mobility of vulnerable households. By addressing these challenges directly, PE&D is contributing to earlier and more coordinated responses thereby reducing child protection concerns. Through professional training, social work practitioners will be able to better identify and manage risks, helping to foster more resilient environments for vulnerable children and families.

Association for the Development and Promotion of Women’s Leadership (ADPWL), Laos

The Association for the Development and Promotion of Women’s Leadership (ADPWL) is Laos’ first sex worker-led organization, fully governed and operated by sex workers. ADPWL is building a resilient rights-based movement that advances the protection of sex workers’ human rights, affording it a unique network through which to protect women from organized crime. ADPWL’s approach is grounded in a transformative vision of justice that recognizes sex workers as agents of change in their broader struggle for human rights. Through community-led outreach, ADPWL strengthens overall protective systems by developing training modules covering trauma-informed care, conducting regular outreach to hotspot locations in Vientiane to facilitate social service referrals, and operating a confidential hotline co-managed by staff and child protection officers.

Hinghoy Noy, Thailand

Hinghoy Noy aims to foster communities in hotspot areas that create spaces of trust, care and community support, enabling young women and girls to grow safely, build meaningful connections, and work together towards a more hopeful future. Through regular gatherings, monitoring and check-ins, Hinghoy Noy brings communities together to strengthen the collective wellbeing, safety and protection that all ‘border daughters’ deserve. Hinghoy Noy sees beyond the vulnerability of young women and girls in migrant communities to the horizon of their full potential.

Organized crime thrives where it remains hidden and where the links between business, politics and crime are poorly understood. Investigative journalism and independent media are an essential part of civil society and can play a key role in bringing organized crime to light and raising awareness among the public.

Kiripost Media, Cambodia

Kiripost Media, a digital outlet dedicated to public interest journalism, is empowering Cambodian journalists with the skills to undertake complex cross-border investigations focused on the nexus of drug trafficking, financial crime and human trafficking. By increasing the capacity of local journalists, Kiripost is strengthening regional reporting on organized crime and raising awareness of the drivers and enablers of criminality.