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Kingdom Of Cambodia
Ministry Of Education, Youth and Sport
Presentation by H.E. Kol Pheng
Senior Minister and Minister of Education, Youth and Sport
World Bank, Washington DC
27 September, 2007
Mr. Emmanuel Jimenez,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is an honor for me today to present to you the education
achievement in Cambodia. As
you already know, in December 2006, Cambodia was awarded the
Education for All
(EFA) Fast Track Initiative status along with 57.40 Million US
dollars grant. We are
honored and proud of this international recognition that our
reform is of high quality,
showing that Cambodia is on its way to achieving EFA. On this
special recognition, we
wish to take this opportunity to express our most sincere
gratitude to World Bank and
UNESCO leadership for supporting us.
Education reform in Cambodia started in 2000 when we first
decided to adopt the sector-
wide approach to revitalize the education system after years of
stagnation. The launching
of our SWAp also coincided with the beginning of the EFA
initiative which helped us to
develop a long-term vision on how our schools would look like 15
years from now. The
main objectives of the education reform consist of:
1. Assuring equitable access to education;
2. Improving education quality and efficiency;
3. Capacity building, decentralization and good governance;
4. Initiating pro-poor education strategies
In order to realize our objectives, the Ministry prepared its
first five year Education
Strategic Plan (ESP) and Education Sector Support Program (ESSP)
in 2002. The
ESP/ESSP is underpinned by a policy action matrix which sets out
annual institutional
and organizational reform priorities. We also adopt a rolling
planning approach to enable
continuous assessment and adjustment of reform policies,
strategies and programs,
through the joint annual sector performance review.
This process allows us to carefully direct the use of growing
resources for education from
both the Government and the international community. The past
few years has provided
at the same time significant achievement and emerging
challenges. There has been
substantial progress in improving access to education at all
levels. In the first three years,
our primary enrolment increased by 15% annually. We are getting
350,000 more children
into school every year; mostly girls in rural areas and children
from poor families. As a
result, Primary school enrolment has risen from under 2 Million
students to 2.7 Million.
2
This initial primary enrolment gain is now steadily progressing
to the secondary level.
Our lower secondary enrolment today has grown by 120% from seven
years ago. In 2006,
the total student population for primary and secondary education
amounted to nearly 3.5
million, where 529,000 students were in lower-secondary and
177,000 were in the upper-
secondary.
Over the past seven years, Government spending on education has
tripled in volume. We
are now the biggest spending ministry at 20% share of the
national budget, compared
with only 13% in 2000. This is directly linked to the
Governments growing confidence
in the ministry's ability to deliver improved performance and
results.
Education opportunities for the poorest families have improved
dramatically. Most of the
0.7 million increase in primary enrolment comes from these
families. A major factor was
our decision to abolish start-off year contributions in 2002 for
basic education.
The number of girls reaching the higher grades of primary school
and subsequent
transition to lower secondary schools is increasing faster than
boys.
The EFA assessment 2000 also highlighted the urgency of
improving efficiency,
especially increasing primary school completion rates.
Completion of a full 6 years of
primary education is the key for quality improvement. The
survival rates have increased
and that drop-out rates have been significantly reduced.
The ministry's review and assessment of reforms during 2004
highlighted that progress
in improving efficiency was slowing and there was a risk of us
not reaching our longer-
term goals.
The EFA assessment 2000 also highlighted the urgency of
improving efficiency,
especially increasing primary school completion rates.
Completion of a full 6 years of
primary education is the key for quality improvement. The
survival rates have increased
and that drop-out rates have been significantly reduced.
The ministry's review and assessment of reforms during 2004
highlighted that progress
in improving efficiency was slowing and there was a risk of us
not reaching our longer-
term goals.
A decentralized system of operational budgets to over 8,628
schools, 24 teacher-training
colleges has been introduced. These budgets ensure that
education institutions have the
resources to run effectively and allow for more flexible
spending decisions at the. grass-
roots level. Network of over 200 decentralized budget management
centers we are
increasingly delegating real authority to managers closest to
students, parents, teachers
and communities.
The main challenge will be to effectively implement and manage
this ambitious range of
reforms. There is always a risk that energy and commitment will
decline in the face of
disinterest or even resistance to radical change.
3
A second challenge will be to ensure predictable and sustainable
level of resources. The
Ministry is confident that these challenges can be met,
especially through a clear
demonstration of results, value for money and committed
leadership.
There is another range of challenges, especially related to the
social and cultural context
of education in Cambodia.
Revitalize a sense of morals and ethics in our youth. We will
make sure that our young
people recognize that they must become more self-reliant and
self-critical and avoid
taking the struggles and sacrifices of their parents for
granted. This will require not just
curriculum reform but an information campaign that begins to
change the culture and
value systems of education and training.
A related challenge is to address the issue of HIV!AIDS, child
trafficking, drug abuse and
other social ills. The new schools to be constructed will be an
important feature of
addressing these challenges, especially in border areas.
Conversion into community life-long learning centers: Having
lifelong learning
opportunities based in the village or community will
particularly benefit girls, ethnic
minorities and the poorest families who find it most difficult
to access new opportunities.
The Ministry will guide by Cambodias National EFA plan, will
continue to build on its
past achievements and through the ESP, ESSP will achieve
longer-term EFA and MDG
targets for education development. The EFA Plan is designed to
build on the growing
partnership for education. The Plan therefore incorporates a
long- term objective for
education partnership development.
The education reform environment in Cambodia is now ideally
placed to benefit from
initiatives that will allow us to accelerate progress towards
our longer-term goals and
objectives. The EFA fast track initiative is a key opportunity
for supporting this aim. The
Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport is working in close
partnership with its
development partners to attain FTI status.
Nevertheless, our success also brings new challenges. Presently,
the drop-out rates in
primary and secondary remain high. In particular, although there
are now many more
girls and poor students entering lower secondary school, their
retention rate is low due to
the significantly higher costs in secondary schooling. To put
this simply, the main reason
many students drop out is because of the need to work and help
with their family
incomes.
The Ministry policy is not only to enroll all the children in
school but also to make sure
that all children complete nine years of quality basic
education. In order to do so, we need
to have a two-prong strategy of prevention and response to
address the current high
dropout problem.
In this first phase of the reform, our strategies have been
mainly preventive in nature,
aiming at alleviating cost burdens on poor families (such as
abolition of school
registration fee, free textbooks, national scholarship program
and primary school
feeding). In the next phase of reform, we also need to
strengthen our response strategy
by providing students that have already dropped out with a
second chance to at least
complete their secondary education.
Firstly, we need to strengthen our non-formal re-entry program
which is designed to help
recent drop-outs to re-enter the formal school system. However,
not all drop-outs can
afford to go back to school, especially at the secondary level.
Therefore, the Ministry is
now embarking on a comprehensive planning exercise to revitalize
the non-formal
equivalency program.
The new equivalency program will emphasize on self-learning in
order to minimize
classroom contact hours. This way, the students can study at
their own pace while still be
able to work and earn a living.
We also see an opportunity to use the equivalency education to
upgrade the quality of our
teachers and school personnel. Currently, the education
qualification of our teachers is
low with less than 40% have completed upper secondary schooling.
Our strategy
therefore is to use the equivalency program to upgrade the
subject knowledge of our
teachers; first at the upper secondary level, then progressing
towards higher education.
In order for the program to be successful, we recognize the need
to give great emphasis
on quality assurance in order to minimize the risk of program
becoming a second class
education.
The aim is to make this program as responsive to the needs of
the students as possible by
removing all the potential access barriers.
In closing, I would like to reaffirm our ministry's commitment
to EFA. We will continue
to deepen and broaden our reforms, guided by a sound policy
framework and a rolling
process of strategy and program planning. The upcoming EFA
mid-term review will
provide a good opportunity for us to conduct a comprehensive
policy review and enable
us to plan for the next phase of education reform.
From our development partners, we would like to see increased
focus on systemic
institution building alongside with increasing use of our
national system for program
implementation. It is only through the strengthening of our own
systems that in the long
term sustainable improvements in delivering education that we
all wish for can be
achieved.
Thank you very much for your kind attention.
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