Local Partner Spotlight: Khmer NGO for Education

ChildFund is committed to partnering with local organisations in the communities where we work, to reduce poverty and achieve long-term and continue improvements in the lives of children and their families.

We believe that working with local partners enhances our capacity to realise children’s rights and improves the effectiveness and reach of the programs we support. By working together, we can harness local knowledge, ensure community needs are met and promote transparency and accountability.

In this new series, we will introduce you to our incredible local partners, whose work is changing the lives of children throughout the Asia-Pacific. This week we spoke with KHUN Bunlee from Khmer NGO for Education (KHEN).

When was your organisation established and why?

KHEN is established in 2014. We believe in education, especially for children education in rural areas, where is a need for better access to education. We have a mission to work with children and their communities in rural and remote areas of Battambang Province to ensure that the rights of all children are fulfilled through access to quality and comprehensive education.

What are the main challenges facing the children and families you work with?

The community has no schools, or sometimes there schools under houses or huts formed by their parents in the community. Children have very little access to education. The value of education is misunderstood and it gets largely ignored because of the geography of rural areas. Over 90% of children’s families rely on agriculture and many children are seen helping or taking off school time to help their family to earn money through rice field work, cassavas, and cashew nut farming. We work in districts where the poverty rate is between 40%-30%.

Children's rights is a huge issue. Many people not aware of what children's rights is and why child protection and safeguarding is so important. Health is also still an issue for children in these communities, where there are not clean waters and toilets, however, from education children and families can learn what changes to make.

What kinds of activities do you implement to overcome these challenges?

We’re working with communities and parents to build proper, child-friendly community schools. We support building and renovating classrooms, equipping schools with desks, toilet blocks, playgrounds, libraries, teaching materials and provide studying material to all children.

This has supported children in over 100 communities to access to an education and encouraged them to go onto higher education. The students we work with at rural schools are now in secondary schools, high schools and universities.

Our education is also disability inclusive. We work with teachers and school management to facilitate teachers training on how to support all children, including those with a disability. We support capacity building for teachers, particularly preschool and primary teachers. This is done in collaboration with Department of Education and other local partners.

How do you monitor the effectiveness of your work?

We work with local stakeholders such as parent associations, school support committees, children’s clubs, schools and local authorities to ensure that our projects are sustainable in the community. All programs monitor the progress of schools, families and villages. All staff are locally recruited and are working in their own community so they have local expertise. They engage with member of beneficiaries, parents and government officer to school visit and beneficiaries visit for progress and provide regular support. Senior members of the team guide the monitoring and complete all evaluations to ensure all programs are on track. We also complete weekly trips to schools to monitor progress.

How long have you been working in partnership with ChildFund?

KHEN has worked with ChildFund since 2017 and this partnership has provided opportunities for KHEN to continue our core work in education and children’s rights. With this support we have expanded into more communities and more regions to build child-friendly schools.

What are the benefits of this partnership?

This partnership has helped our team gain more experience that we can apply to our daily work. We have received enough support for a community model schools. Given this opportunity of partnership, we keep improving and expanding our schools works for more areas. Over the years, we have renovated and built more preschools for early age children. Training from ChildFund has taught local youth volunteers to be more confident in their leadership roles.

What new initiatives do you have planned for the future?

We are learning how to implement through digital initiatives, though there have been challenges. We plan to continue to support this kind of digital platform to children during the pandemic. We are introducing a computer course to our youth group, so that they could help young children to learn how to use computers. If possible, we want to teach other life skills including teaching English, where possible, to rural children to feel more openly and know the world more broadly.

What would you consider to be the greatest impact your organisation has had on children, families or communities you work with?

The lives of rural community children, including the children with disability changes, keeps on changing through education. If we continue to build schools and support learning in communities, then they will become empowered. Children in rural areas are now able to learn to read and write. We are trying to increase the enrollment numbers in these schools and lower the dropout rate across Cambodia.

As a staff member, can you share with us a recent personal highlight of the work you do?

Education can help change transform the lives of rural community children and support them to reach their full potential. But we need to start the work now and reach out to rural children. We must start to empower children and their communities to get a better education. It should be all equality and equity, and social justice and education for all! I strongly believe a change can happen through education.