Gender and Development

Cambodia

Japan Fund For Poverty Reduction (JFPR) 9028-CAM: Targeted Assistance for Education of Poor Girls and Indigenous Children, 2002

Education is central to Cambodia’s National Poverty Reduction Strategy which guides the country’s poverty reduction and economic development objectives. The Government has achieved significant expansion of primary education in the past decade with an overall enrollment rate of 84% for boys and 81% for girls. Primary education enrolls the largest proportion of poor children where the gender gap is smallest. For secondary education, the enrollment rate drops drastically to 17% for boys and 14% for girls with only 8% coming from poor families. The dramatic drop rate in the participation of poor girls at the secondary education level results from a number of social and cultural factors including household responsibilities, early marriage, shortage of school transportation and lodging facilities, travel distance to schools, financial constraints, and parental attitudes that favor education of boys to girls.

Objectives and Scope

• to develop a specific targeting mechanism for the poor, particularly girls and children in ethnic minorities
• to decentralize the management of such programs to communities, school management committees, and commune councils

The Project has four main components:

1. Community Mobilization: NGOs promote awareness of the importance of girls’ and indigenous children’s education and mobilize parents of poor households and indigenous communities to participate in setting up local management committees (LMCs). LMCs are responsible for administering the scholarship program, including responding to dropouts through home visits, conducting parent orientations, reviewing complaints about the selection process, sensitizing parents to the needs of children, and meeting regularly with beneficiaries regarding their progress and problems.



2. Capacity Building for Scholarship Programs:
Capacity building at the national level focuses on the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports to develop its institutional capacity to provide targeted assistance programs throughout the country. At the community level, NGOs provide training to Scholarship Management Teams (SMTs) and LMCs for effective management of the scholarship programs.


3. Pilot Testing of Scholarship Programs:
Seed capital is provided to establish targeted assistance programs in selected lower secondary schools to cover the direct costs of education for girls enrolling in grades 7-9 for three years. This covers newly enrolled girls as well as poor girls who are already enrolled but risk drop out due to high costs. Special scholarships are also offered to ethnic minority children (boys and girls). Scholarships are classified into three categories:

• $45 per year for those who live less than 4 km in non-ethnic minority areas and less than 3 km in ethnic minority areas
• $60 per year for those who live further than 4 km in non-ethnic minority areas and those who live from 3 km to 7 km in ethnic minority areas
• $90 per year for those who live further than 7 km in ethnic-minority areas

The selection process is managed by the LMCs and is based on four categories:

• poverty and socioeconomic status
• risk of dropout
• distance to school
• parents’ attitudes towards education



After selection is completed, parents of selected students sign a formal contract to set out the conditions for assistance and possible consequences should the scholarships provided not be used for the direct educational expenses of their children. To contribute to the sustainability of the local scholarship program and to increase civic responsibility and solidarity in the communities, an additional $1 equivalent contribution is requested from all students in grades 7-9 every school year.

4. Dissemination of Experiences and Policy Dialogue: The lessons learned from the Project are shared with government, donors and NGOs through workshops, seminars, the internet and publications to provide opportunities for replication as well as policy dialogue among various stakeholders and national level policymakers.

Pilot Project Results by 2005

• NGOs were effective in awareness raising campaigns for education of girls and children of ethnic minorities in 1,621 communes in 183 districts through live performances and video presentations.
• LMCs and SMTs have been established in all JFPR schools and trained by NGOs to manage the scholarship program.
• All LMCs were able to select scholarship students with the majority adhering strictly to the selection criteria.
• Visits have been made to the home of scholarship students both during selection and follow up monitoring.
• Quantitative and qualitative reports produced by SMTs and LMCs were used to produce a comprehensive analysis as part of the annual program evaluation.
• The total students (91% girls and 9% boys) who benefited from academic years 2003/2004-2005/2006 were 15,086 (including 1,375 boys) which is 98% of the total planned 15,345. The average drop out rate as of December 2005 was 3.4%, much lower than the national average, around 20%.
• 53% of scholarship students had good or excellent achievements, 42% reached average achievement levels and only 1% was dismissed from the program due to poor achievement.
• The Project has shared experiences with other donors. In 2004-05, the Belgian Technical Cooperation Initiative launched a scholarship program patterned on the JFPR program targeting three provinces where JFPR is not represented.
• The Project staff was involved in the review of the Government’s Education Strategic Plan 2004-08 where they discussed the issue of “assuring equitable access” and were able to include victims of HIV/AIDS, disabled and minority children and children of subsistence farming families into the definitions of “poor children”.
• Close linkage is maintained with the World Bank’s Cambodia Education Sector Support Program scholarship program launched in 2005 as it will takeover the Project when it phases out in December 2006.