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                                                                                                    April 20, 2007

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After the Khmer Rouge period, the late 1990s represented a transition from emergency relief to
reconstruction and development in Cambodia. In 1997, Cambodia ranked 137th out of 174
countries on UNDP's Human Development Index and, according to the Cambodia
Socioeconomic Survey, net primary enrollment rates were a mere 55 percent.




This project aimed to develop and put into practice a participatory approach to school quality
improvement and performance-based resource management. The goal was to have participating
schools eventually show improvements in student enrollment, attendance and achievement. It
also set out to strengthen and enrich government policy through more innovative practices at the
school level.




Students in more than 1,000 participating schools in Cambodia achieved higher test
scores in literacy, had lower drop-out and higher promotion rates. On average, in each of
the 172 school clusters supported by the project, around 40 students who may have
dropped out of school each year, stayed on.


Highlights:
- Among the different quality improvement interventions in the program, money invested in
teacher development had the highest pay-off in terms of student retention, promotion and
student learning. Cost-effectiveness calculations show that even small amounts spent on
teacher training may have a large impact on learning.
- Extensive classroom observations by an independent impact assessment team show evidence
of teachers adopting child-friendly approaches to classroom routines, management and teaching.
- Health and vocational training had a measurable effect on reducing student drop-out.
Investments in equipment and school infrastructure were also important factors in improving
promotion rates.
- At the district level, the project helped the Office of Education's efforts at decentralization
through the provision of support services.
- This successful pilot was used as a model for the development of education projects in
Indonesia and Afghanistan.
- The total cost of the project was US$4.9 million, entirely financed by IDA through a Learning
and Innovation Loan.
- The project provided on-the-ground evidence of the feasibility of decentralizing financial
management processes for education, by introducing direct disbursements to schools.
- The project played an important role in boosting the status of the District Office of Education by
giving it a key role in supporting decentralization, thus considerably improving communications
and coordination within districts.
- The NGO 2003 Consultative Group Statement identified, among others, some of the
experiences piloted in this project as best practice.




The project served as a platform to establish partnerships with the World Food Program (WFP),
the UK Department for International Development (DfID) and Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO)
- all of which contributed complementary funding and interventions for the project. WFP
established a community-driven school breakfast program in a sample of schools, while VSO
(with DfID funding) placed volunteer facilitators at the local level to support school and
administrative staff capacity building, school development planning and school effectiveness
strengthening.




The Education Sector Plan 2006-10 promotes a rigorous agenda to increase access to basic
education, improve the quality and relevance of schooling and enhance decentralized
management and efficiency of educational services. The Cambodia Education Sector Support
Project, a follow-on to the project discussed here, is closely aligned with these goals. It sets out
to make access to educational services more equitable by reducing cost barriers to schooling,
and to improve the quality of education through decentralization of school management,
professional development for teachers, provision of instructional materials and more systematic
student performance monitoring.




Kingdom of Cambodia: Education Quality Improvement Project (1999 - 2004)
Project documents