Inside ESCUP

The Education Support to Children of Under-Served Populations (ESCUP) Project is designed to address the needs of improved educational access and quality to marginalized groups in Cambodia including ethnic minorities (Muslims groups-such as Cham-and highland peoples), children with special needs, the very poor, girls, and children infected or affected by HIV/AIDS.

The ESCUP project will work school clusters in three provinces in Cambodia and will implement interventions in three main categories: teacher education, educational access and quality, and school-community partnership. School clusters in target areas will develop School Improvement Plans, based on stakeholders' assessment of their own needs, which will be the basis for identifying specific project technical interventions.

Component 1 Teacher Education
Interventions under component 1 include: scholarships for fast-track teacher training students; tutoring for student teachers; community teacher training; in-service teacher training support; in-school support to working teachers; organizing study tours for teachers; providing a training program for mentoring neophyte teachers; and increasing access to credit schemes to offset the problem of late payment of teachers' salaries.

Component 2 Educational Access and Quality Interventions under component 2 include: primary and lower secondary school scholarships; providing technical and materials support to schools and teachers participating in the Ministry of Education Youth and Sports' School Readiness program; providing training, remuneration and materials for tutors to provide remediation for Children at Risk; developing short modules on multiculturalism for inclusion in the Local Life Skills Program curriculum, and provide technical support for teachers teaching the life skills curriculum; and providing small school grants for infrastructure rehabilitation.

Component 3 School-Community Partnership
Interventions under component 3 include: increasing the involvement of Muslim organizations in scholarship implementation in Muslim communities; conducting community and school member sensitization workshops to improve the support of children with special needs; providing training and technical support for child-to-child outreach for children with special needs; and training community research teams to identify out-of-school children.

EQUIP1 Partners
World Education

Additional Partners
Kampuchean Action for Primary Education (KAPE)

Award Amount
$4.451 million

Award Duration
April 1, 2005 - September 30, 2008

Key Personnel
Chief of Party: Mr. Kurt Bredenberg

USAID CTO
Sieng Heng

For more information, contact:
David Kahler, david_kahler@worlded.org
Adela Mizrachi, amizrachi@air.org