Donors gathering at an education conference last week said the Ministry of Education’s five-year plan for reform, which includes universal access to nine years of basic education by 2005, food programs and scholarships, is overly ambitious and requires a more realistic time frame.
But the donor groups, which ranged from the European Union to Unicef and the World Bank, also applauded the ministry for working to reform education in Cambodia, which has one of the lowest literacy rates in the region.
Asian Development Bank representative Urooj Malik said the ministry deserves credit for its attempt to include other ministries and agencies in its reform efforts. “We are impressed with the involvement of other sectors in the country as well as other countries within Asia. This demonstrates a new paradigm of development,” he said.
Members of the ministry, international donors and local NGOs met Thursday afternoon to discuss how much money the donors will contribute to the ministry’s reform program.
The ADB gave the largest contribution, pledging $38 million in loans in the next three years, and further support in the subsequent three to four years if the initial undertaking is successful.
Hara Chisa, the representative for the Japan International Corporation Agency, said the organization did not allocate any education money in addition to the funds given at the international donor meeting in Tokyo earlier this month because JICA saw problems with the proposal.
“The list of items to be achieved is quite enormous,” she said after the conference. “We don’t know how they will be realized. We share this worry with other donors.”
The EU echoed these concerns, saying that the need for reform is obvious, but a more reasonable time frame is needed. “We need to know what measures will be taken to ensure adequate government funding for the project, before making a firm commitment,” Bob Baldwin, the EU representative, said.
Anders Frankenberg, of the Swedish International Development Agency, told the ministry that SIDA would like to receive a proposal of plans and programs put together by the ministry and Unicef by the end of August. SIDA will then appraise the proposal and aim to sign a new four-year program by the year’s end.
Belgium pledged approximately $30 million to education and health in the provinces of Kompong Cham and Siem Reap, said country representative Laurent de Valensart.
“These places are highly populated and readily accessible,” he said. “We thought it was better to start with something very accessible, then we can expand if that initiative is successful.”
Closing the conference Thursday afternoon, Prime Minister Hun Sen called upon donors to continue supporting education reform and poor people in both rural and urban areas. Reducing costs on families is essential in order to allow children to go to school, he said.
“Access to education is an effective instrument of empowerment,” he said. “Highly educated people provide a strong force in regional and global affairs.”
