The Educational Support to Children in Underserved Populations (ESCUP) Program is a recent initiative funded by USAID to improve access to a quality basic education for marginal groups in Cambodia. These groups include ethnic minority children, girls, disabled children, and the poor. The program is currently working in three provinces in eastern Cambodia where access impediments have been significant, particularly in remote areas. The causes are a complex interaction between supply and demand-side factors that include teacher shortages, low educational relevance, restrictive access due to direct and indirect costs, and the perceived low value of education by community members, among other factors. ESCUP is implemented by three agencies; World Education, Kampuchean Action for Primary Education (KAPE), and CARE International in Cambodia with oversight and management support from the American Institutes for Research and EQUIP 1 in Washington D.C, U.S.A. The program works closely with the Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport (MoEYS) as well as with Provincial and District Offices of Education, school and community committees, and Commune Education For All Commissions (CEFAC). To support the implementation of specific program activities, ESCUP has set up partnerships with local organizations such as Women and Children Rights Development (WCRD), the Cambodian Islamic Youth Association (CIYA) and Professors Alliance for Development (PAD).

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 key principle in CFS programming is to avoid stand-alone interventions and to approach school development holistically across multiple dimensions. Program implementation relies heavily on the use of school clusters, which are formal groupings of schools overseen by a Local Cluster School Committee (LCSC). The organization of schools into clusters by MoEYS helps to simplify communication between program and schools and greatly expedites the ability to maximize coverage and increase penetration of rural areas. The program’s technical approach also includes (i) the use of cluster and secondary school grants as a means of resourcing schools, (ii) the use of activity menus in the development of school improvement plans, and (iii) utilization of local committees such as Local Cluster School Committees (LCSCs) and Local Scholarship Management Committees (LSMCs) to implement activities on the ground.

Program interventions are being implemented in three provinces: Kampong Cham, Kratie, and Mondulkiri. All three provinces are adjacent to one another but have very different characteristics. Kampong Cham consists of densely populated low lands and Mondolkiri is situated in the remote highlands with a high representation of the Phnong ethnic minority group while Kratie has a number of minority groups and extensive areas of forest and water. Direct assistance is being provided to 151 primary schools across 18 clusters, which comprise about 47,612 children. In addition the program is also providing assistance to 14 lower secondary schools, comprising 9,524 children. Target areas have generally been selected based on their remoteness, poverty indexing, rates of dropout and participation, and prevalence of minority groups.

stakeholders (i.e., community members, teachers, school directors, and children) though with technical support from ESCUP technical teams. These interventions may be core activities (e.g., scholarships, school mapping, community outreach, etc.) while others are more discretionary (e.g., life skills, infrastructure improvements, library improvements, etc.). Activities are identified as part of a local needs assessment exercise in which stakeholders develop plans that outline needs, objectives, and appropriate interventions. Budgetary resources for the implementation of these activities are then provided to stakeholder institutions (LCSCs, CEFACs, etc) in the form of grants to maximize the level of ownership of the program. Although stakeholders directly implement activities by themselves, they receive technical and capacity building support from program staff.

In addition, there are a number of interventions which are centrally mediated by ESCUP technical teams. Many of these interventions refer to teacher education workshops that aim to improve the quality of educational provision. Such interventions are implemented across all sites (e.g., community teacher training, upgrading of remote teachers, school readiness program training, etc.) though in some cases they may be limited to case study sites where the interventions are more experimental in nature (e.g., Supplementary Khmer Language and Bilingual Classroom Assistants). Budgetary resources for such interventions are not disbursed through local channels but directly by central program level.

To improve access, ESCUP has worked with schools and communities to identify children at risk. A total of 77% of schools conducted school mapping exercises to identify out of school children. As a result of these efforts, 536 children who were out-of-school were brought back into the school system; 60% of these re-enrolled students are either minorities, physically challenged, or girls. The program is providing scholarships to 4,817 students of extremely low socio-economic status at primary level and another 809 at secondary level, 22% of these children are from minority groups. ESCUP has also facilitated the referral of 362 children with disabilities or health ailments to appropriate service providers and is providing remedial support to 4,700 students with special learning needs.

ESCUP has implemented several interventions with respect to improvements in educational quality and relevance. The recruitment of 184 community teachers have helped to reduce the pupil - teacher ratio (PTR) in 67% of target schools and 63% of supported “incomplete” schools were able to add a grade. Because dropout is usually linked to a high PTR and the prevalence of incomplete schools, it is expected that these improvements should have a major impact on dropout rates. To improve the relevance of provided educational services, local life skills activities are currently being offered in 33% of target schools, which exceeded initial expectations. Target schools are implementing a total of 650 activities that promote educational relevance (e.g., life skills, remediation, School Readiness Program, library provision, etc).

ESCUP has also made significant progress in supporting Provincial Teacher Training Colleges (PTTC's) to improve their response to local school needs. Negotiations with program staff, Ministry and provincial officials resulted in an increase of the PTTC intake quota for remote districts supported by ESCUP to 150 candidates as schools in these districts suffer from severe teacher shortages. The program assisted to recruit 101 local candidates into PTTCs with a 2-year scholarship². Among these candidates, 41% are female and 16% are from ethnic minority groups. The interventions to enhance community participation and improve the sensitivity of schools to community needs show encouraging results. Community members were actively involved in the recruitment of the 184 Community Teachers trained and supported by ESCUP, resulting in a representation of 26% from minority groups. This compares with a reported 5% among state teachers, even in areas where minority groups comprise a large proportion of the local population.

Nearly all (90%) of ESCUP supported schools are implementing at least one activity that promotes school-community partnerships (e.g., mapping, community based life skills, etc.). In terms of the oversight of Community Teachers, a program survey found that all of thecommunity-led Management Boards responsible for this task met the criteria for effective management. Preliminary findings from focus group discussions suggest that perceptions of school sensitization to community needs have improved since the beginning of the program.

Many significant lessons have been learned from the implementation of the ESCUP program over the course of the last year. These range from the design of interventions to reduce language barriers to school access among minority groups, to the role of patronage networks in communities and the need for advocacy, as well as teacher issues relating to variable educational backgrounds and levels of interest in professional development opportunities. In the future, the ESCUP program faces the prospect of selectively increasing the coverage of certain experimental interventions balanced against the need to consolidate, strengthen, and improve many of the interventions discussed earlier. This must be done at the same time that program staff implement several new interventions planned for Program Year 2, namely the development of CFS classrooms and support to multi-grade teachers. The program faces the challenge of finding a balance between expansion, consolidation, and the completion of planned programming.

Contact Information:
World Education Cambodia - Kurt Bredenberg, Chief of Party: (855) 012 963 353 / (855) 023 216 854. kurtb.worlded@online.com.kh

¹ Data for indicators measuring improvements in the learning achievements are not yet available but will be collected at the end of the academic year.
² This does not include an additional 30 candidates for areas supported by the OPTIONS Program which is led by World Education. Thus, both programs were able to collectively utilize 131 of the places provided under the government quota.