Education and training

Though a bit young to be socio-political analysts, Cambodia’s children are major believers in the social value of education, are wary of the negative side effects of alcohol on their communities and place a high priority on honest government, a study released yesterday says. According ...

Fewer and fewer primary schoolteachers are willing to cope with poor pay and the worst student-to-teacher ratio outside of Africa, government data shows. Annual reports released by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport reveal that despite fervent recruitment efforts, every year since 2005 – when ...

In the past two years, the French embassy in Phnom Penh has been drawn into at least two high-profile cases in which their nationals have died in suspicious circumstances in Cambodia. In an attempt to improve forensic investigations in the Kingdom, the French embassy announced ...

The government affirmed its commitment to bilingual education for ethnic minority children in Cambodia’s northern provinces at a UNESCO conference in Bangkok last week. Speaking at the fourth International Conference on Language and Education: Multilingual Education for all in Asia and the Pacific, Ton Sa Im, ...

US Ambassador William Todd on Thursday urged the Cambodian government to strengthen the skills of its laborers, in order to meet the needs of an integrated Asean in 2015. The 10 Southeast Asian countries that comprise Asean are all moving toward an integrated economic block, which ...

Teachers across Cambodia are insisting pay raises aren’t just an election year issue. More than 30 representative teachers gathered for the start of a three-day seminar in Phnom Penh yesterday to continue demanding living wages. The teacher are asking for 250$ per month, according to seminar ...

The country’s draft $3.4 billion national budget for 2014 proposes yet another $920 million in new debt to make ends meet, the same amount taken on this year, according to a copy of the spending bill obtained Thursday. The draft budget calls for nearly $400 million—or ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen signed off on a directive last week to trans­fer 11 government bodies, previously overseen by Cabinet Minister Sok An, to relevant ministries and institutions, further cutting the expansive portfolio of the deputy prime minister in the wake of July’s national election. ...

The National Assembly’s 12-member permanent committee will take its first look at the country’s $3.54 billion draft budget for 2014 on Monday, though officials are still refusing to offer a breakdown of how the money will be spent. The draft, which allocates more than $400 million ...

Cambodia’s newly appointed minister of commerce said Thursday that he plans to reform the country’s economy ahead of Cambodia’s entrance into the Asean Economic Community (AEC) 2015, though he and other officials did not say how they plan to accomplish that goal. Speaking to reporters on ...

Teenage pregnancies are hindering Cambodia’s development as young mothers are unlikely to finish school and therefore lack job opportunities, government and U.N. officials said at the launch of a global report on adolescent pregnancies on Wednesday. “The Ministry of Women’s Affairs acknowledges that adolescent pregnancies have ...

The Phnom Penh Municipal Court on Wednesday charged convicted British pedophile Richard Fruin, 36, with sexually abusing two brothers, aged 8 and 11, at a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, court officials said. While the court has yet to decide Fruin’s fate, his case—and many similar ...

An Oddar Meanchey director of education is denying a complaint filed to the Ministry of Education alleging he took school supplies from a public school for use in a private school and pocketed salaries of teachers who no longer worked there. In a letter dated Monday, ...

A group of NGOs condemned rampant abuses of sexual and reproductive health rights in Cambodia last week, just days before the government submitted a human rights progress report to the United Nations. The Cambodian Center for Human Rights, in cooperation with the Asia Pacific Network of ...

A teacher at Tea Chamrath High School in Pursat town has accused school director Bou Sovannarith and deputy director Chhub Buntha of forcing students to pay bribes in the form of, among other things, enrolment fees for matriculation into the 2013-2014 academic year. Phat Malin, the ...

The Education Ministry on Monday said it was in line for a near 20 percent hike from the government’s $3.52 billion draft budget for 2014, approved by Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Cabinet on Friday, though other details of how money was to be allocated remained ...

Cambodia has made little progress on gender equality and is the lowest-ranked country in the region, according to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2013 Gender Gap Index released Friday, slipping a place from last year to rank 104 out of 136 countries. The index examines the ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen’s new Cabinet on Friday approved a 2014 draft budget of $3.5 billion, a 13 percent increase over this year’s budget, but gave no details as to how the money would be spent. The CPP also said it will go ahead with a ...

The owner of the popular local ABC radio station on Thursday urged university students to call his station and inform listeners if their teachers discuss information that could be deemed critical of the government. An ABC radio employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity as ...

Cambodia has some 3,000 registered non-profit groups. Some work on highly sensitive issues such as violence against women and human trafficking. But there are few Cambodians formally trained for such work. That is now changing with the country’s first university-level degree program for social workers. When ...

At around 6 p.m. in Phnom Penh each evening, about 5,000 large brown bats, having spent the day dangling upside down from a tree at Wat Phnom, spread their huge wings and fly out to begin their nightly search for fruit. And as useful and ...

Two years out from the 2015 Millennium Development Goals’ target of universal access to education, Cambodia remains plagued by school infrastructure shortages, with a scarcity of classrooms and decrepit facilities that threaten students’ safety, NGOs and teachers say. At Slorkram Primary School in Battambang, teachers ...

A small gathering to mark World Teachers’ Day at Phnom Penh’s Freedom Park briefly descended into chaos Sunday when a crowd of rally-goers wrested a concealed gun from a man working for the Ministry of Information after he forced his way to the front of ...

Despite progress having been made in recent years to improve girls’ access to education, there is still a gender-based inequality, particularly in rural areas, children’s rights experts said on the International Day of the Girl Child on Friday. “At the moment there is still a slight ...