The EQUIP1/Cambodia Educational Support to Children in Underserved Populations (ESCUP) Program is a 3 1/2 year USAID-funded project that began in April 2005. The project focuses on inclusion and quality within the formal education system. The program targets the basic education sector (Grades 1 to 9) and geographical areas where many children are either not enrolled in the formal school system or exhibit high rates of dropout from the system. From a geopolitical perspective, the program also seeks to integrate marginal social groups, particularly ethnic groups such as the country's Muslim minority, more closely into Cambodian society in a way that preserves the integrity of their own culture but which also promotes national unity. ESCUP interventions are implemented in four large adjacent provinces in eastern Cambodia: Kampong Cham, Kratie, Mondulkiri, and most recently, Ratanakiri. Across these four provinces, the program is supporting a total of 167 primary schools from 22 clusters and 19 lower secondary schools. The overall program design continues to have three overarching technical components - Access and Quality, Teacher Education, and School-Community Partnerships, and a fourth component, Program Management. The program's technical approach includes (i) using cluster and secondary school grants as a means of resourcing schools, (ii) using activity menus in the development of school improvement plans, and (iii) utilizing local committees such as Local Cluster School Committees (LCSCs) to implement activities on the ground. Overall, the program seeks to promote the government's recent adoption of Child Friendly Schools (CFS) as a front line strategy to improve quality in the basic education sector.

The Activity Menu Toolkit has been developed to serve as a reference and tool for Ministries of Education and other development practitioners in their efforts to implement non-prescriptive interventions. The Activity Menu was developed in order to engage school committees to prioritize the problems they encounter and to choose the appropriate interventions to solve those problems. The process begins with each school committee conducting a needs assessment to determine and prioritize their problems. While this was developed for a Cambodian context, the general model can be adapted for other countries and regions.