Basic Education in Cambodia: Quality and Equity

Not only is formal education a determinant of an individual's opportunities in the future, but basic education is also a human right. Education is an important requisite for the accumulation of “human capabilities” which are necessary for the individual to reflect, make choices, and participate and live a better life in society (Sen 1999). Given the overriding importance of education and particularly basic education, no country is opposed to the idea of Education for All (EFA). The challenge is how to reach the stage where everyone has achieved at least a quality basic education necessary for their function in society. Many countries that have endorsed the EFA as their education goals have introduced many education reforms to improve both access to, and quality of, education. This chapter seeks to illustrate the challenge in achieving equity and quality of basic education using Cambodia as a case study. It reveals that to achieve equity and quality of education, mere resource provision is not sufficient. Achieving equity and quality is a challenging task that requires a careful and well-coordinated policy design and implementation at all levels of education administration. It requires political will on the part of the central government, and the capacity to innovate and implement progressive policy at the local levels.

The chapter begins with a discussion on what has dominated thinking in education development. It then proceeds to illustrate the case of Cambodia by first reviewing the policy objectives and agenda which have been put forward for implementation with a great sense of optimism. Next, it highlights the impact of the policy reform on the primary education sector, revealing that while the reform was successful at improving enrollment rates in some provinces, it generally was not successful at raising the quality of primary education. The chapter then closely examines why quality of education is difficult to achieve by this large-scale reform. It ends with the conclusions and some policy recommendations for policy-makers to consider when designing and implementing education reform.