Since joining GPE in 2006, Cambodia’s progress toward a stronger education system has been marked by many milestones.

By 2012, the country had achieved near universal primary education. In 2013, the Teacher Policy Action Plan was established to strengthen recruitment and performance, and the quality of teaching has since steadily improved. In 2015, Cambodia began a comprehensive revision of curricula for pre-primary to upper secondary education, which was completed in 2018.

Learning assessment results from 2016 showed that more than half of grade 6 students were proficient in Khmer language and mathematics. By 2021, however, learning levels had dropped, most likely due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education system.

Evidence of learning loss along with other data has informed the development of Cambodia’s Partnership Compact (2023), which aligns partners and resources behind reforms to improve student learning.

GPE regularly assesses its support to understand the extent to which this results in positive change. Cambodia has participated in:

1. a country-level evaluation of GPE support from 2014-2019
2. the first phase of GPE's thematic and country-level evaluation covering 2023-2024.

How GPE’s partnership with Cambodia has improved education

GPE has helped Cambodia strengthen education sector planning.

In 2014, although the national planning cycle and GPE’s grant cycle did not occur at the same time, GPE still used its funding requirements as a lever to ensure Cambodia’s education sector plan 2014-2018 underwent quality assurance to ensure a credible plan endorsed by stakeholders.

In 2016, GPE funding supported Cambodia to conduct a Rapid Education Sector Analysis, covering trends in access, equity, quality and internal efficiency, which served as a critical evidence base for the sector plan midterm review.

The review led to consolidation of separate policies on equitable access to education and improving the quality of learning into one policy; an examination of student academic achievement; an update of policy implementation strategies; the realignment of progress indicators and targets with newly emerged country priorities for the education system; and further alignment with Sustainable Development Goal 4 by adding inclusion and lifelong learning to education policies.

In 2021, Cambodia began implementing its goals to transform the education system through an approach focused on accelerating progress, as outlined in GPE's Strategic Plan for 2021-2025.

The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports led policy dialogue with stakeholders, including development partners, NGOs, civil society, school leadership, teacher representatives and the private sector, to identify barriers within the system to improving student learning and solutions to address them—further articulated in Cambodia's Partnership Compact.

The process helped establish consensus on prioritizing gender equality, quality learning and quality teaching.

GPE has strengthened an already inclusive education sector dialogue.

Cambodia has well-established mechanisms for education sector dialogue. The Joint Technical Working Group in Education was created in 2004 to enhance effectiveness and partnership among education stakeholders in support of implementing sector plans. The group is co-chaired by the education ministry and development partners.

Development partners also established an education sector working group, which meets monthly to promote coordination among donors and education NGOs. Civil society is represented in both groups through NGO Education Partnership, an umbrella organization of over 150 NGOs working in education.

The independent appraisal of the education sector plan for 2019-2023, as part of GPE's quality assurance process, helped focus sector dialogue and provided a space for development partners to agree on key issues and provide coordinated feedback to the ministry.

Additionally, education sector reviews conducted during GPE grant periods 2008-2011 and 2015-2017 provided a valuable forum for discussions between the ministry and development partners on progress and challenges.

Stakeholders interviewed for the first phase of GPE's thematic and country-level evaluation covering 2023-2024 noted that while Cambodia had strong mechanisms for sector dialogue, the partnership compact development process increased participation and coordination.

GPE has financed education expenditures where government funds alone would have been insufficient.

GPE funding covered a small proportion of the education sector plan from 2014 to 2018, but Cambodia highlighted the value of this targeted contribution in filling gaps related to the construction of preschools and providing scholarships at the primary level.

Additionally, GPE’s construction of 500 community-based preschools was seen as a model for low-cost, standardized construction, and was scaled up by the ministry.

GPE has supported Cambodia to acknowledge gaps in gender equality.

Cambodia conducted analysis to support the development of its partnership compact and identified challenges to achieving gender equality, including gender imbalance in secondary education: boys have lower learning levels than girls and are more likely to drop out of school.

Meanwhile, girls have lower enrollment rates in technical education, and women hold a low proportion of leadership roles within the education sector. The analysis enabled the education ministry to pinpoint issues that have the potential to enhance gender-responsive planning and increase gender parity in education.

Activities supported by GPE include diagnostics on factors affecting boys' achievement and retention as well as student retention in secondary education. These will inform the development of the next Gender Mainstreaming Strategic Plan and identify urgent interventions at school, sub-national and central levels to prevent dropout and motivate students to continue in school.

Alignment and harmonization remain challenges

In 2011, Cambodia established a pooled fund—the Capacity Development Partnership Fund—which first had contributions from the European Union, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and UNICEF and later from GPE and the United States Agency for International Development.

While this mechanism is being used successfully and provides the possibility for greater alignment and harmonization of resources with national systems, its full potential has not yet been realized.

From 2014 to 2019, financial contributions from donors to support education goals in Cambodia were made largely in the form of stand-alone projects, signaling that GPE's promotion of aligning external financing with national systems had limited influence during this period.

As of 2023, similar challenges remained. While partners valued the coordination and dialogue opportunities during the development of Cambodia's Partnership Compact, this process, particularly the subsequent funding applications, has not immediately resulted in the achievement of further harmonization of resources.

Cambodia noted the need to incentivize cooperation to improve overall alignment of development partners, especially donors.

Signs of a stronger, more equitable education system

The 2014-2019 evaluation of GPE support to Cambodia assessed progress toward a stronger education system and noted evidence of an increasingly equitable system:

• Dropout rates decreased during 2014-2017 from 8% to 4% for primary, and from 21% to 16% for secondary, which was likely linked to the government’s scholarships for students from low-income families.
• The 2018 Policy on Inclusive Education and the 2019 Multilingual Education Action Plan set the education system on a path to being more inclusive of students with disabilities and students from indigenous and ethnic minority groups.
• The Gender Mainstreaming Strategic Plan developed by Cambodia for 2016 to 2023 was incorporated into the education sector plan following the country’s midterm review to better address gender inequities.

Curricula revision, which began in 2015, had been partially rolled out by 2019, with a focus on pre-primary and grades 1 to 3.

Ongoing reforms to the teaching profession were yielding positive results: in 2018, over 900 teachers upgraded their qualification to a bachelor's degree through a new fast-track training initiative and over 4,000 teachers had done in-service training under a new continuous professional development framework.

Enhanced sector management was observed through progress in conducting national learning assessments and the introduction of school inspections as a reform priority.

GPE’s 2023-2024 evaluation assessed the transformation potential of Cambodia's priority reform, the country's position to implement reforms and GPE support to the reform process up to the partnership compact development.

The findings highlight Cambodia's use of a strong evidence base to identify its priority reform, drawing on both national and global evidence to design solutions to respond to learning loss and persistent inequities.

In addition to country-level evaluations, GPE produces data, such as the GPE 2025 Results Framework for Cambodia, to help monitor education system progress.

Learning and adapting to improve GPE support for education systems

Reflecting on its engagement with GPE, Cambodia has stressed the need to ensure that its planning and implementation capacities are supported over time, especially technical capacities for statistical data analysis to build a reliable evidence base to inform decisions about its education system.

In 2019, the education ministry questioned how GPE can better advocate for aligned modalities of education sector financing in Cambodia. And while GPE puts the concept of country ownership at the forefront of sector planning, the government indicated a need to better balance the degree of country ownership in relation to GPE quality standards.

These points, along with feedback from other partner countries, inform the refinement of GPE’s operating model.

Learning together as a partnership through honest exchanges focused on the country experience enables GPE to adapt and improve support for stronger education systems.

Learn more:

• Summative GPE country program evaluation for Cambodia. 2019
• Thematic and country-level evaluation: Cambodia case study. 2024
• Country-level and thematic evaluation: Synthesis report – Phase 1