Location
Prey Veng, Kep, Kandal and Takeo Provinces, CAMBODIA
Background
Early Childhood Care and Education are underdeveloped in Cambodia. Many children, particularly those of poor and vulnerable backgrounds, miss out on opportunities for optimal cognitive, socioemotional and physical development during their early years. As a result, many of them are not ready to successfully transition into primary school and end up being ill-prepared for lifelong learning. Some causes:
- There are a number of issues regarding healthcare for young children: malnutrition, premature birth, and issues around breast-feeding and the introduction of complementary food, to name but a few.
- Parents lack an understanding of the importance of the early years and their roles in their children’s development process.
- There is a lack of quality support, teaching and learning materials, teacher training, and adequate infrastructure to facilitate the transition period to primary school.
- Unequal access to public preschool services.
Our Actions
Our answer to these issues is based on 4 cornerstones:
Improving ACCESS
Promoting QUALITY
Strengthening the SYSTEM
and INFLUENCING for policy and behavior change.
Our goal is to expand early childhood education services for children between 0 and 6 years old, with the priority given to community and home-based preschools, as a way to improve more equitable access the quality Early Childhood Care & Education services.
Our initiatives to achieve this include:
- Increasing the enrollment of 3,080 children between 3 and 5 years old to improve their primary school readiness.
- Improving the learning environment through enhanced quality of teaching, learning materials and infrastructure.
- Raising awareness in 700 parents and carers about Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), child development and parenting roles.
- Providing technical support and training to 1,540 preschool teachers and school directors so they can create sustainable, quality child-friendly learning environments.
- Improving the community’s quality of life through basic health care and hygiene for 21,200 community members.
- Promoting local ownership and involvement of the community.
- Expanding community child development and care programs by conducting community activities, which build the parenting skills and knowledge and promote positive parenting/caring behaviors.
- Raising awareness with government officials, local authorities and the community about the importance of education and other social and environmental issues that affect the community (gender, human rights, disease, deforestation, domestic violence).
Partners
- Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport
- Commune Councils