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Child labour, education policy and governance in Cambodia

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Page 1: Child labour, education policy and governance in Cambodia

International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 496–504

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

International Journal of Educational Development

journa l homepage: www.e lsev ier .com/ locate / i jedudev

Child labour, education policy and governance in Cambodia

Chae-Young Kim 1,*

A R T I C L E I N F O

Keywords:

Child labour

Education policy

Governance

Cambodia

A B S T R A C T

This paper considers how the issue of child labour is located in Cambodian education policy debates and

how it is affected by the major constraints surrounding the Cambodian education sector. In particular, it

asks why Cambodian policy makers have not sought to address the issue explicitly despite its

considerable, and adverse, impact on children’s school education. In doing so it first identifies the

Cambodian education sector’s passive approach to child labour, leaving it as a problem to be resolved by

wider economic development. Secondly, it finds that the major constraints surrounding the education

sector, including the issue of its governance, contribute to sustain a wide gap between stated education

policies and actual practice, thus further diminishing working children’s chances to benefit from a school

education.

� 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

According to official statistics produced by the CambodianMinistry of Education, Youth and Sports (MOEYS), over the past 20years, Cambodia has achieved a substantial expansion in primaryeducation with the number of primary school students increasingfrom 1,276,957 in the 1989/90 academic year to 2,311,107 in 2007/08 (MOEYS, 2008). However, in 2004/5, when the primaryeducation enrolment rate reached its highest ever level of 95.1per cent, its completion rate was only 46.8 per cent (MOEYS,2005a), while the lower secondary education enrolment rate was25.7 per cent (MOEYS, 2005b). This indicates that the Cambodianprimary education retention rate is very low and that nearly half ofchildren who initially enrol discontinue schooling before theyreach grade six.

The Cambodia Child Labour Survey (CCLS), a nationallyrepresentative household survey, found an estimated 52.0 percent of 7–14 year-olds, over 1.4 million children in total, wereeconomically active in 2001 (UCW, 2006) – ‘economically active’meaning being involved in productive activities, whether for themarket or not, paid or unpaid, legal or illegal, excluding choresundertaken in children’s own households and schooling (ILO,

* Corresponding author.

E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] This paper is based on research conducted while the author was a PhD. student

at the University of Cambridge, UK, between 2004 and 2007.2 UCW (2006) defines market economic activity as activity leading to the

production of goods and services that are primarily intended for sale or are sold on

the market, and non-market economic activity as activity leading to production of

goods primarily for own final consumption. However, there is not a universally

accepted definition of child labour (see Kim, 2009). In this paper the definitions that

international agencies often use, especially in conducting household surveys, are

described where the paper refers to data from these sources to provide information

about the state of child labour in Cambodia.

0738-0593/$ – see front matter � 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.ijedudev.2011.03.002

2006).2 Using the same data, but applying a narrower definition ofchild labour, which is all economically active children below 12years of age and those 12–14 year-olds who worked more than14 h a week or, if less than this, in ‘hazardous’ sectors identified bythe Cambodian Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training(MOLVT) such as rubber plantations, fishery and brick making(MOLVT, 2004), 32.9 per cent of 7–14 year olds participated in childlabour – 31.7 per cent of girls and 34.0 per cent of boys. Likewise,and more recently, the 2004 Cambodia Socio-economic Surveyfound 47.1 per cent of all 10–14 year-olds were economicallyactive. Furthermore, while most Cambodian working childrenwere enrolled in school, such work was found to be associated withdelayed school entry, negative impacts on their learning outcomesand higher early drop-out rates – with these outcomes becomingmore negative with age, particularly among girls (UCW, 2006;World Bank, 2005).

The data presented in the above paragraph suggests that thescale of child labour in Cambodia – one of the highest rates inSoutheast Asia – acts as a major obstacle to achieving the country’sambitious goal of achieving universal basic education for 9 years:access to, and completion of, primary and lower secondaryeducation for school-aged children (Royal Government of Cambo-dia, 2003). However, and despite this clear relationship, there areno specific, or adequate, educational policies in place to address theproblem. This paper asks why this is so. As a result, it discussesthree related themes: how national education policy makers viewchild labour as a policy issue; whether, and how, they think, it canbe addressed in the current Cambodian situation; and finally, whatconstraints hinder the formation and implementation of effectivepolicies required to address it.

Doing this requires some understanding of Cambodia’s tragicmodern history and, in particular, the devastating legacy of theKhmer Rouge regime which governed between 1975 and1978. This period was characterised by a massive loss in human

Page 2: Child labour, education policy and governance in Cambodia

C.-Y. Kim / International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 496–504 497

capacity – better-educated people were a particular target of theregime – which still underpins many of its current social andpolitical struggles and has resulted in a low level of nationaleconomic development. It also requires understanding howcontemporary Cambodian policy makers – both nationals workingfor the national government and nationals and non-nationalsworking for international organizations and NGOs – view thecurrent problem of child labour against this historical backdrop.This paper deals with this latter issue using data from interviewswith education policy makers in Cambodia (as well as other datagathered during the fieldwork for this study).

This data is used to identify a pervasive culture of ‘passivity’among education policy makers in addressing the problem of childlabour. The paper argues that this ‘passivity’ arises, in part, from asomewhat uncritical acceptance of the ‘poverty’ discourse forexplaining child labour (see Kim, 2009) but it also argues thatmajor constraints in the country’s system of policy and practice,including a deeply-entrenched problem of corruption in the civil/public service, serves to sustain the problem.3 Improvements ingovernance are therefore considered to be critical in breaking thevicious cycle between child labour and the low levels ofeducational access and completion described above and fornarrowing the wide gap between education policy and practice.

2. Child labour, poverty and policy intervention

Cambodia provides both a unique and typical case study of howthe problem of child labour is located in the national policy contextof a developing country, and especially in relation to its widersocietal and political issues. However, while the problem of childlabour in Cambodia has not been the focus of much academicresearch, except for projects conducted by aid agencies, childlabour has been widely studied in both quantitative and qualitativeresearch in many other countries. Many econometric studies, usingdata from national or provincial household surveys, have exam-ined the relationships between the incidence of children’s workand various independent variables such as per capita or householdincomes, children’s school enrolment or attendance rates, parentaleducation levels, national educational and other social policymeasures and so on (for example, Awoniyi and Oluwatayo, 2008;Edmonds, 2005; Gonzalez-Vega and Maldonado, 2008; Hadi andNath, 2000). Likewise ethnographic studies have investigatedmany aspects of child labour in its immediate familial, employ-ment and community environments to provide rich analyses ofchild workers’ lives and the factors that influence them.

Taken together these studies have increased our understandingof child labour in many different local and industrial contexts.However, they also reveal the complexity of the factors whichdetermine both its incidence and the effectiveness of the policyinterventions used to address it. Hence, to provide somebackground information to inform the Cambodian researchpresented in this paper, we begin by reviewing the main findingsfrom research on the factors determining the incidence of, and thepolicies associated with the reduction or elimination of, childlabour.

At first glance the global geographic distribution of workingchildren today, and the history of economically advanced countrieswhich used to have large numbers of working children, appear todemonstrate a negative association between the rates of children’swork and aggregate incomes at both the country and individualhousehold level. Some studies support this perception further by

3 Corruption indicates the abuse of public office for private gain, including:

officials accepting, soliciting or extorting bribes; engaging in patronage and

nepotism; appropriating state assets; or improperly diverting state revenues

(Ferranti et al., 2009).

showing that children’s economic activity rates seem inversely,though non-linearly, related to GDP per capita (Dehejia and Gatti,2002; Fallon and Tzannatos, 1997; Fares and Raju, 2007;Gunnarsson et al., 2005; Edmonds and Pavcnik, 2005). Thesesuggest that the share of working children declines at a decreasingrate as per capita national incomes increase. In particular theyfound that rates of child labour fell relatively fast as the economiesof low income countries expanded, more or less stabilised amongmiddle income countries until a critical level of higher income wasattained, after which child labour rates decline once again.

However, while these studies comparing national rates ofchildren’s work with the aggregate national income levels (percapita GDP is simply GDP divided by a nation’s population) seemedto indicate a more or less consistent relation between children’swork rates and income levels, those studies which analysed theincidence of children’s work with levels of household wealth within

countries provided rather more complex findings on the relation-ship between children’s work rates and poverty. For example, inthis group of studies, some found a positive relation between thetwo variables – i.e. children worked more in the households withhigher incomes (Cartwright, 1999 in household farm and enter-prise work; Patrinos and Psacharapoulos, 1995) – others found anegative relation (Cartwright, 1999 in wage work; Ray, 2000;Rosati and Tzannatos, 2006), while a third group found aninsignificant relationship between poverty rates and child labour(Awoniyi and Oluwatayo, 2008; Bhatty, 1998; Canagarajah andNielsen, 1999).

In Cambodia, the relationship between children’s work andhousehold wealth appears to be non-monotonic with householdwealth appearing to play a less significant role in children’s workrates than in school attendance (UCW, 2006). In particular,household wealth is positively associated with children’s workwhere wealthy families own productive assets such as land. Thisquestions the conventional linkage between child labour andpoverty, especially considering that three quarters of Cambodianworking children do so in agriculture (UCW, 2006) and anestimated 87 per cent of Cambodian working children are unpaidfamily labourers (World Bank, 2005). Likewise, these data alsosuggest a gap between the causes of child labour as perceived byCambodian policy makers and the reality, with a substantialnumber of local policy makers believing that parents only let theirchildren work for reasons of their households’ immediateeconomic survival (see Kim, 2009, for further discussion of thisissue).

Furthermore, as Bhalotra and Tzannatos (2003) argue at thecross-national level, it is not clear whether it is the rise inhousehold incomes, the introduction of relevant legislation, orother structural changes, which serve to eliminate or reduce childlabour. Likewise, and after examining trends in child labour acrossa number of countries in different regions, Basu (1999) argued thatoverall economic growth is by no means the only, nor the mostimportant, factor in the mitigation of child labour, as changes intechnology, improvements in the conditions of the adult labourmarket and the better availability of decent schooling all appear tolead to the withdrawal of children from the labour force. Also, afterreviewing the historical circumstances of those industrialisedcountries which have virtually eliminated child labour andachieved universal levels of primary education, Weiner (1991)stressed the significance of shifts in societies’ attitudes towardchild labour and school education, and not merely economicgrowth, as the main driving force for change across a diverse rangeof situations and nations.

There are not many empirical studies which investigate theimpact of policy measures on the reduction of child labour andtheir consequent impact on school participation rates (regardlessof whether they were put in place to explicitly target the issue).

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C.-Y. Kim / International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 496–504498

Existing studies, with their mixed patterns of findings, alsodemonstrate the complexity of the issue and suggest sustainableimprovements require changes in almost all related dimensions ofsociety. For example, Canals-Cerda and Ridao-Cano (2004) showedthat, in rural Bangladesh, after the introduction of a compulsoryprimary school education law, a child had significantly less chanceof working during their primary school years and an increasedchance of reaching secondary school. But this was only significantif the child was not working at all in the first place. They also foundthat the free tuition policy for girls in secondary education did nothave any significant relationship with the likelihood of girls atprimary school working. However, the free tuition policy had apositive relationship with progression rates from primary tosecondary school for both boys and girls who were both workingand attending school. Hazarika and Bedi (2003), in rural Pakistan,found that labour market child labour rates and schooling costswere positively associated, while household child labour rates werenot, suggesting that a reduction in schooling costs alone wouldhave only a limited impact in reducing child labour given theirdomestic work.

Considering the complex relationships between child labourand household poverty, and the often simplified and conven-tional beliefs about it, policies to address child labour and, therelated aim of achieving universal basic education, need to bemade based on fine judgements using the evidence fromresearch. However, as the Cambodian case study used in thispaper suggests, the national policy process, hampered both bymajor national contextual constraints and by policy makers’conventional beliefs, often failed to achieve an active engage-ment with the issue or to suggest clear policy directions. Weiner(1991) stressed the importance of the role of policy makerswhere increased income levels, the need for a more skilledlabour force and greater governmental resources did notautomatically result in the voluntary end of child labour andthe achievement of universal primary education. In his study ofIndia, the main difficulties which prevented the achievement ofthese governmental goals were found to be the beliefs of thosewho made and implemented policies rather than what werecalled the ‘social realities’. Similarly Kabeer (2001) argued thatwhile child labour was mutually reinforced by poverty andunderdevelopment, policy failure and the poor implementationof educational services, ambivalence at the policy level amongthose working in the child labour and education arenas alsocontributed to the persistence of the problem. Kabeer also notedthat those governments with the greatest commitment tocountering these problems at both the national and local levelsseemed to have made the greatest progress on child workregardless of the incidence of poverty.

[()TD$FIG]

Education policy and programme formulation at level of Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports

Implementation at levels of education offices of provinces, districts and schools

Translation of policy into practice and

feedback

Fig. 1. A model of the education policy process in Cambodia. Note: Dotted arrows indicate

from fieldwork in Cambodia in 2005.

3. Interviewing policy makers in Cambodia

Exploring this final set of results in the Cambodian contextforms the basis of the rest of this paper. For this study, 51 policymakers – 33 Cambodians and 18 foreign nationals – wereinterviewed in Cambodia during 2005. They can be divided intothree groups. The first consisted of Cambodian governmentofficials – mostly from MOEYS and a few from MOLVT and theMinistry of Planning. The second was made up of those working forthe UN and other multilateral and bilateral aid agencies, includingthe United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organiza-tion (UNESCO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), theWorld Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the International LabourOrganization (ILO), the World Food Programme (WFP), theSwedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA)and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). The thirdgroup comprised of those working for, or advising, internationaland local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Save theChildren, Kampuchea Action for Primary Education, WorldEducation, World Vision and CARE. Inclusion of the representativesof the latter two groups was done because, as the simplified modelof the Cambodian education policy process shown in Fig. 1suggests, international aid agencies and NGOs form two distinctplayers in the governmental policy process, owing to their massivefinancial and technical assistance to the Cambodian government –a total of US$549 million in official development assistance in 2005alone (UNESCO, 2008).

Within each group, purposive sampling, a measure designed toincrease the likelihood that any variability common in a socialphenomenon is represented in the data (Maykut and Morehouse,1994), was applied to identify appropriate interviewees and thiswas complemented by snow-ball sampling strategy. For theinterviews, a semi-structured interview schedule was preparedbased on an analysis of those policy documents that could beobtained before the fieldwork and a review of the literaturerelating to the research topic, including the recent politicalsituation in Cambodia. The interview questions were preparedunder the themes of whether, and how, respondents viewed childlabour as a barrier to achieving universal basic education; whatwere the current education policy responses to child labour; howthey thought child labour should be addressed in the Cambodianeducation sector; and finally, what they thought were thestrengths and weaknesses of Cambodian education planning andimplementation. Under each theme, in addition to the mainquestions, some possible probing questions were also prepared.The semi-structured interviews therefore allowed intervieweeresponses to be analysed in comparison with one another with adegree of consistency while the probing questions were used to

International agencies: UNICEF, UNESCO, World Bank, ADB,SIDA, etc.

NGOs

weaker influence than non-dotted arrows in the figure. Based on the analysis of data

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C.-Y. Kim / International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 496–504 499

obtain further, more in-depth, information. The interview schedulewas piloted with people from Asia and the Pacific Regional Officesof UN agencies including UNESCO, UNICEF and ILO and a regionalNGO in Bangkok, Thailand, who monitored operations in theirCambodian national offices. These pilot interviews took placebefore travelling to Phnom Penh, Cambodia and were used tomodify the interview schedule.

Arranging interviews in Cambodia often required repeatedphone calls, emails and visits to the interviewees’ offices. However,once they were arranged, most interviewees showed littleresistance to discussing a wide range of issues facing Cambodia.The exceptions were a few Cambodian government officials who,in response to some probing questions, and especially thoserelating to the issue of corruption in the country, either skilfullystrayed away from what was being asked in their answers orconfronted the researcher by saying, for instance, ‘why is it aproblem?’ or by claiming ‘those problems have been solved now’.Nevertheless, such responses were not frequent and did not occurto those questions directly related to child labour. Hence, while theliterature on interviewing policy makers warns of the difficulties inaccessing them and of the likelihood of merely political orsuperficial responses, in Cambodia, and especially among theCambodian interviewees (let alone the foreign nationals), policymakers did not appear to try to hold back any details about thecountry’s situation. It is speculated that, unless it was a high-ranking government official commenting on the corruption issue,because Cambodia’s dire socio-economic situation is so wellknown, most felt no need to describe it other than honestly.

But, at the same time, it was also felt that there were clearlysome limits to which the Cambodians were willing to be open tothe researcher about their problems. In response to a query on thisissue, a senior child labour specialist from the ILO Regional Officefor Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok (who visited Phnom Penhduring the study) explained that, in Cambodia as often elsewhere,child labour was quite openly discussed, but could become asensitive issue if individual accusations were made (or implied). Ifthis is so, it may be that the interviewees in this study were willingto discuss issues for which, according to their beliefs, simplypoverty could be blamed and where there were no suggestions (orimplications) of personal involvement.

The interviews were undertaken in English and later tran-scribed verbatim.4 These transcripts were then coded using a list ofcategories that was developed from the analysis of the documen-tary data, an on-going analysis of interview data during thefieldwork and, finally, by reading the transcripts to saturationpoint. They were then analysed thematically. The interviewextracts quoted in this paper were selected for their ability toexplicitly express the main analytical points, and in fewer words,than others. Finally, as is the case in some other relatively smallcountries, people who have been involved in the Cambodianeducation sector for some time can feel that the sector is rathersmall and, given only a small amount of detail, can identifyindividual respondents without much difficulty. Hence, to helpmaintain the anonymity of the interviewees quoted in this paper,the particular organization they worked for and their specific roleswithin them are not provided.

4 English is the working language of people employed by international agencies

and NGOs in Cambodia, and also of those working for local NGOs when they interact

with foreigners from these two organizations. As for Cambodian government

officials, those in the posts and levels which had regular contacts with international

agencies and foreign technical advisors often had a good command of English. In a

couple of instances, where Cambodian government officials did not feel confident in

their use of English, an interpreter was used during the interview.

4. Child labour and education policy in Cambodia

One feature of the interviewees in this study was that some, andespecially those who worked for international agencies and NGOs,could be seen as experts in Cambodian education due to theireducation and training backgrounds combined with their oftenlong experience of the country. The interview responses of theseexperts tended to be rather reflexive in that they went beyondsimply answering the interview questions per se. For example, inhis response to an interview question relating to the weaknesses ofCambodian education planning and implementation, a foreigntechnical advisor to MOEYS indicated why it was important toinvestigate larger social issues in order to understand the problemsfacing Cambodian education:

You are studying child labour as a measure of how the societyperceives the children, what they expect of children and as away into their attitudes to educational opportunities of theirchildren, and so it is a way of linking the situation of educationto the broader society.

In some cases, with their knowledge on the policy issuesinvolved, they could also discuss different approaches and possiblepolicy solutions to them. However, like the other interviewees,they were also limited by their acceptance of poverty as the maindeterminant of child labour in Cambodia. For example, in responseto the interview question as to why there were no educationpolicies which explicitly targeted child labour, a Cambodianworking for an international agency said that ‘pro-poor’ policiestargeting poverty also indirectly targeted child labour becausesuch poverty caused child labour:

They give scholarship. . . 40 dollars to children to come toschool. Is it addressing the issue directly or indirectly? Poorchildren, all of them work, all of them work. You will rarely seechild work and child labour in the Education Strategic Plan, butthere are other terms like pro-poor policy, target disadvantagedchildren, or prioritising girls.

In the above extract, this interviewee voiced the standard viewof policy makers in Cambodia: all children who worked did sobecause they were poor and it was girls who were more likely torisk missing out on their education for this reason. Yet Cambodianofficial statistics do not fully support this view: while boys aremore involved in economic activities, girls appear to be moreinvolved in non-economic activities: in the 2001 CCLS 39.6 per centof 7–14 year-old girls did non-economic activities of more than 7 ha week (7.8 per cent of them more than 14 h a week) while 34.6 percent of boys in this age group did so (5.8 per cent of them more than14 h a week) (UCW, 2006).5 However, combining the rates for boththe economic and non-economic activities for more than 14 h aweek that boys and girls in this age group conducted suggested itwas boys who were more likely to work. Hence the genderinequalities in enrolment rates in Cambodia – in 2006, for primaryschool net enrolment rates, 91.0 per cent for boys and 89.0 per centfor girls and for secondary school net enrolment rates, 33.2 per centfor boys and 28.3 per cent for girls (UNESCO, 2008) – may notalways be because girls work more than boys, but may reflect otherreasons such as parental attitudes toward girls’ education.

5 Non-economic activity is defined to be any productive activity falling outside

the boundary of economic activity and consists mainly of work activities performed

by a household member in service to the household and its members – installation,

servicing and repair of personal and household goods; minor home improvement,

maintenance and repair; indoor and outdoor cleaning and cooking; and care of

family members – as well as volunteering and community service (UCW, 2006).

Page 5: Child labour, education policy and governance in Cambodia

6 Motorcycle taxis are motorcycles carrying passengers on their back seats.

C.-Y. Kim / International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 496–504500

Likewise, in response to the interview question of how criticalthey thought the adverse impact of child labour was on children’sschooling, Cambodian government officials, in particular, did notappear to show any realistic grasp of the extent of child labour as anationwide phenomenon or seemed unwilling to admit to the truescale of the problem. The following extract is from a response tothis interview question by a Cambodian government officialworking for MOEYS:

I don’t have data on this kind of children. Some survey saysaround 300,000 children. It is not a high priority because ithappens in some areas, not in towns or cities, but in remoteareas helping parents. I am sorry that I don’t have the data onwhich to answer your question.

This official’s response that child labour was not high on theirpriority list, in addition to his later claim that the government wasalready addressing it through measures to combat poverty (as theinterviewee in the previous extract also suggested), also provided arationale why there were no specific education policy measures toaddress it. Interviewees argued that poverty was ‘the big problem’(to use one interviewee’s own words) which caused manyeducational problems including high drop-out and repetitionrates. Consequently, as is shown in the extract from anotherMOEYS official quoted below to the interview question of what wasthe role of MOEYS in solving the problems that arose from childlabour, they claimed that, as poverty went beyond the influences ofeducation policies, child labour was also beyond their control. Thisresponse exemplified many Cambodian education policy makers’prevalent and passive approach to the problem of child labour.

Because outside school, children are with parents, with theircommunity, it is difficult for the education sector to beinvolved. . . We cannot work directly about it. Maybe someother Ministries like Labour and Vocational Training, orMinistry of Women’s Affairs, because they work closely withcommunities. For us in the education sector, we work withchildren in school.

Some government officials and a Cambodian from an interna-tional aid agency, as indicated in the above extract, also expresslystated that addressing the problems of poverty and child labourwas the responsibility of other Ministries, such as those whoworked more closely with families and local communities.Although in Cambodia, as in other parts of the world, communi-ty-based approaches to school education have been widelypromoted – in particular, through UN and NGOs’ initiatives toinvolve parents and communities in school development andmanagement processes – some local education policy makers stilllimit the boundaries of their influence to what occurs within theschool. This rigid demarcation of sectoral responsibilities – viewingchild labour as more of a labour and community relations problem– also seemed to contribute to the passive approach of Cambodianeducation policy makers to its adverse impact on the achievementof universal basic education.

This sense of child labour as beyond the influence of educationpolicy makers and schools was mirrored by a couple ofinterviewees from international agencies who, to the questionof how the impact of child labour on children’s school educationshould be dealt with in the education sector, related it to some ofthe bigger problems that Cambodia faced. This is demonstrated inthe following extract from a foreign national working for aninternational agency.

Children working and not going to school are just a manifesta-tion of these larger structural issues related with macroeco-

nomic issues. Economy not growing fast enough. . . there are nojobs that are able to absorb those who are coming of age into thelabour force. There is the issue of low salaries that does notmotivate civil service. Therefore it becomes the justification forcorruption. Also there is very little democratic space. The headof the opposition party was stripped of his immunity justrecently.

Until these inter-related structural issues had improved, theyargued, child labour would not be fundamentally dealt with.Furthermore, the centrality of such governance issues was widelyvoiced by interviewees from international agencies and NGOs,both foreign nationals and Cambodians, not only with regard to theissue of child labour but to wider problems in Cambodianeducation administration and management. As discussed above,child labour, of itself, did not seem to be a sensitive issue to discusswith Cambodian government officials as long as widespreadpoverty could be blamed for its continued existence and noimplication of individual responsibility was being made. However,most of them found the issue of poor governance uncomfortable totalk about: in general, they either said that current reforms wereeliminating corruption or tried to put the topic to one side.

5. Child labour and the major constraints around theCambodian education sector

In this section, the major constraints surrounding the Cambo-dian education sector are discussed as factors which constrainpolicy makers, policy and practice processes, and so inhibit thecentral issue of combating child labour. The following foursubheadings encapsulate the main themes that emerged induc-tively in the interviewees’ responses to the interview questionsabout the strengths and weaknesses of Cambodian educationalplanning and implementation.

5.1. Poor government and under-functioning people

The majority of working children in Cambodia are enrolled inschool, meaning they combine schooling with work. This is alsotrue of their teachers and of many people who work in the centralgovernment, and especially in MOEYS, below the level of chiefs ofoffices in departments. For example, a vice chief of an office inMOEYS had also been teaching in a private English institute in theevenings and, as a result, was earning more than twice hisgovernment salary. Likewise, the chief of his office was sellingfertilizer, while others had stalls in the markets or drovemotorcycle taxis, working only two hours a day in the office.6

Limited budgets also did not produce much work for them to doand for this reason, and the need for a bigger salary, also meantmany capable people left government to join aid agencies or NGOs.

Nevertheless, a Cambodian interviewee from a UN agencydescribed the situation as ‘we are not lacking money, but leakingmoney’. In this vein, interviewees from outside the governmentcriticised the problem of not reforming inefficient practices in thecivil service and the loss of money into undocumented channelswhich arose from the lack of governmental commitment ratherthan the lack of a budget. And other sources of data suggested theseconcerns were justified. A household survey on corruption inCambodia found that in 2004, on average, five per cent ofhousehold income was spent on bribes, indicating the directimpact of bribe payments to public service providers on thehousehold economy (CSD, 2005). Similarly, Transparency Inter-

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C.-Y. Kim / International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 496–504 501

national’s 2007 Corruption Perceptions Index ranked Cambodia at162 out of 179 countries (Transparency International, 2008).

5.2. Gap between policy and practice

Many economically developing countries suffer from unsatis-factory and dysfunctional governance systems of malfeasance,inefficient revenue collection systems and the weak delivery ofvital public services such as education (Shah, 2006, 2007). This isalso true of Cambodia where, for similar reasons, there is asignificant gap between published education policies and actualpractice. As one interviewee argued, what actually goes on at thepractical level – which reflects the history of the system and thetypical features of the Cambodian government structure – is oftenquite different from what is stated in policy documents. The reasonfor this, a few interviewees, both Cambodian and foreign, argued,was that some foreign technical advisors leading policy formula-tion did not understand the history of Cambodia or local situationssufficiently well to adequately consider the effects of localproblems such as corruption and the politicisation of the educationsystem. On the other hand, a couple of foreign technical advisorssaid that, since MOEYS did not have enough competent people toproduce policy – due to the virtual elimination of educated peopleduring the Khmer Rouge regime mentioned above – their ownroles had to be much bigger and more detailed in Cambodia than inmany other countries. Interviewees commonly identified thislimited human capacity, running all the way down from MOEYS toschools, as a major cause of poor policy implementation.

On the other hand, in response to the interview question ofwhat they thought were major challenges in policy implementa-tion, a couple of MOEYS officials, including the one quoted below,argued that their own ideas were not sufficiently heard andreflected in education policies and this added to the problem ofpoor implementation.

If our idea has been considered seriously, realised into policies,we will have a sense of responsibility. If we think that the policyis our idea, everybody’s idea from this department, then we willhave a sense of bigger responsibility. . . It might be easier. . .toimplement. . . We hear them saying that we should developownership in development planning and responsibility. But, sofar, it didn’t develop in that way and we always meet technicaladvisors to do the work. I think if they leave we can do our workthe same.

This MOEYS official, who sounded frustrated but also somewhatresigned to their situation, complained that some technical[()TD$FIG]

Low s

Low nationa

Dependence on technical advisors in policy process

Dependence on international assistance

Low human capacity Limited moeducation pe

Poor govPoor implementation of education policies

Fig. 2. Constraints surrounding the Cambodian education sector. Bas

advisors rarely visited his department to understand its activitiesand outcomes prior to writing policy documents. Thus, feeling thatthey had not really participated in policy formulation processes,officials seemed to be less motivated about implementation. Whileit was difficult to tell how many people in MOEYS shared the view,it is noteworthy that there were some who thought foreigntechnical assistance was not contributing very much, or addingmuch value, to Cambodian education. Furthermore, despite whatdonor agencies often claim about building developing countries’governments’ ownership of development projects, they felt theywere not really given the chance to develop and exercise it.

Another reason for the gap between policy and practiceidentified by interviewees were the misjudgements of aid agencieswho expected that their highly subsidised pilot programmes couldbe replicated, or expanded to cover wider areas, by MOEYS,without adequate financial and technical support. For example, aforeign technical advisor to MOEYS described pilot programmeslimited to certain areas with intense donor support as ‘veryexpensive tinkering around [on the] margins of education’. ACambodian academic also expressed a similar opinion:

They paid teachers to come to school regularly. . . It was becausethey believed that increased instructional hours would increaseperformance of students. So, they said, ‘you don’t have to do anyextra preparation for classes; all you have to do is to come toschool and teach according to the timetable’. They thought itwas successful. The project lasted three or four years, but whenthe project finished, no more money, then teachers just wentback to their old habit.

Fig. 2 provides a model of the complex relationships betweenthe main constraints affecting the Cambodian education sectorwhich results in the poor implementation of education policies.The components in this model, and the relationships betweenthem, were identified from the interview data. It is important tonote that, as the arrows between the various components suggest,each deep-rooted problem feeds into another and, by so doing,helps to maintain the wide gap between education policy andpractice. Most importantly, as a result of this, at the ultimatepractice level, school attendance was not always seen as necessaryby Cambodian parents and children, nor were schools playing areaching-out role for these absent children.

5.3. Low human capacity or inefficient utilisation of capacity

A Cambodian interviewee called his staff ‘second-hand people’or the ‘lesser of our human resources’. By this he meant that many

Absence of rule of law & principles

alaries

l revenue

tivation of rsonnel

ernance Lack of political will

ed on the analysis of data from fieldwork in Cambodia in 2005.

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staff were filling posts above their ability levels because those whowould otherwise have been employed had been killed during theKhmer Rouge regime. While the interviewees’ shared view was thatthe quality of Cambodian people’s ability had improved they felt itwas not by as much as might have been expected given the largeamounts of foreign aid that had been poured into Cambodia since theearly 1990s. While some government officials claimed the capacitybuilding of Cambodians had been neglected in comparison to the aidgiven to the physical side of education, interviewees outside ofgovernment pointed to the uncommitted attitude of, and politicalrivalries within, government as another major problem. These latterinterviewees also argued that the issue of low human capacity wasoften only an excuse used by the government to aid donors, as therewas evidence of capable people outside the government beingexcluded by systemic politicisation and corruption (as well as thelow pay problem noted above). Hence, while the Cambodianpeople’s capacity was certainly not high, it did not seem to beirredeemably low and this problem was increased by the way inwhich the existing human capacity was often underutilised, forexample, by the widespread under-employment of people workingin the civil service as described earlier.

5.4. Child labour, political will and power relations in policy process

To the interview question of what they thought were the majorchallenges in policy implementation, the interviewees, andespecially those outside the government including a Cambodianacademic quoted in the extract below, argued that whatcontemporary Cambodia really needed most was greater politicalwill at the highest levels of government.

From February to May [the dry season], in some families,children get up at two o’clock to fetch just a gallon of water.How can they go to school if they wake up at two or three towalk a very long distance to get water? If we have irrigationsystem all over the country, with that first, other things willfollow. . . With one year’s foreign aid, about 500 million dollars,you can dig a channel even to your home, but it has already beenmore than ten years.

The destruction of the nationwide irrigation system during theKhmer Rouge period is believed to be a major cause of the currentdifficulties in rice production. But, in the extract above, theinterviewee expressed his main frustration at the lack of politicalwill which could have already changed this situation and, by sodoing, improved many children’s participation in education. Asdemonstrated in Fig. 2, the only element which intervieweesperceived as causing the other problems, but was not itselfderived from any of the others, was a ‘lack of political will’. Thisindicates that they thought greater political will – especially athigher levels of the government – could kick-start the changesnecessary to break the cycle of interrelated constraints and bringabout more effective policies. In other words, the real problemwas not the constraints posed by low human capacity or a lack ofgovernment budgets and facilities: it was how they were dealtwith.

To the interview question of how they coped with the currentconstraints, the MOEYS official quoted in the following extractdisplayed his sense of helplessness at his country’s situation ofdepending too much on external aid and, consequently, beinginfluenced by accompanying technical advisors.

We depend too much on the loan, on donors, especially ininvestment in education. We need. . . help from technicaladvisors because some of them are working for internationalagencies. Some of them are more influential on policy making,

you know. When and how, we can change the situation,when. . .

However, despite this MOEYS official’s personal feeling of beinghelpless toward aid agencies, the power relations between the aidagencies and the Cambodian government were far from simple andunilateral. It appeared that, since the period of the UN TransitionalAuthority in the early 1990s, the Cambodian government hadaccepted external recommendations for the purpose of politicalexpediency. However, even when these had been adopted, thegovernment had been able to turn them in the ways they wanted(Kamm, 1998). Furthermore, the fluctuating power structurebetween them has led to a gap between the level of policyformulation – a level at which international donors were able toexpress their views more easily – and the level of practice – wheredonors were unable to have their intentions effectively realised.

This demonstrates the limits donors faced in areas whereoutcomes are more determined by issues of national governance.After all, what is real may be what comes into being, not what wasplanned. The gap between policy and practice also means thatsome MOEYS officials’ aspirations to take a greater part in thepolicy formulation process, as seen above, will not be realised untilinternational donors see some hard proof that their financial aiddoes not flow into undocumented channels. In the Cambodianeducation sector no one political group is continuously dominant.Instead each group’s sphere of influence is constantly negotiatedand readjusted, depending on, and running through, the variouslevels of decision making and in relation to who has the mostknowledge and resources relevant to a particular policy issue.

6. What is good governance?

During the interviews, it emerged that the key to solving theconundrum of the interrelated constraints surrounding theCambodian education sector was to be found where governmentpower was centralised and where this created, or was associatedwith, a massive waste of revenues through corruption whichdiffused downward throughout the whole civil/public service.Interviewees argued that greater political will could lead to bettergovernance by encouraging more transparency in the govern-ment’s administrative and financial transactions and by promotinga wider commitment to the policy promises made by them for theCambodian people and children. So what, precisely, is governanceand, more importantly, good governance?

While governance is not a concept that lends itself to precisedefinitions, practices of governance may be associated with thefollowing three dimensions: how and why governments arestructured; what processes they employ in governing; and whatresults they are able to accomplish in serving their society (Jreisat,2002). Using these three dimensions, the problems in governancein Cambodia become apparent. The first coalition government inCambodia, which was the result of an adaptation to the outcome ofexternally mediated elections in 1993, was made possible bydomestic political circumstances which were, in turn, a product ofthe country’s modern history. Thus, despite a clear majority for themonarchist National United Front for an Independent, Neutral,Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia (often called FUNCINPEC: theparty’s French acronym), the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP)forced the formation of a coalition by threatening to secede the sixeastern provinces under their control. The result was a coalitionthat did not reflect the democratic wishes of the Cambodianpeople. Indeed, over time, the CPP managed to gain moredominance and became the sole governing party in 2008. Thislack of accountability may serve to lessen the incentives toimplement effective policies. More generally, Ayres (2000) arguesthat the gap between tradition, which drives the Cambodian polity,

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and modernity, which the government has allegedly adopted andpromoted, explains the failure of national educational projectsunder successive governments since the pre-independence period.While this observation is clearly valid at a descriptive level, it wasthe lack of political goodwill and poor governance that drove thecreation of such a gap in the first place and, as a result, to thecurrent state of Cambodian education.

As Khan (1996) suggested, if good governance can bepromoted through three basic aspects including: the ability ofcitizens to freely express views and access decision-making; thecapacity of government agencies (both political and bureaucrat-ic) to translate these views into realistic plans and implementthem cost effectively; and the ability of citizens and other civicinstitutions to compare what has been asked for with what wasplanned and to compare what was planned with what wasimplemented, then good governance may mean participatoryand democratic governance (see also Unterhalter and Brighouse,2007; Sen, 2009). In this participatory and democratic model ofgovernance, the citizens’ ability to fulfil a scrutinising role isas essential as the government’s capacity to implement.This suggests effective democratisation requires educatedcitizens.

But in Cambodia, it is not only just education, but also a realsense of safety and socio-political stability that citizens reallyneed: the long period of civil unrest and insecurity which hascharacterised their recent history may have made manyCambodians almost incapable of the longer-term planning oftheir lives which, in turn, may have reduced the value they placeon obtaining education. For similar reasons, more activeparticipation in the political process may also be seen, to them,to be less viable. The sense of insecurity that lingers in the masspsychology of Cambodians is vividly illustrated in the followingquote from a Cambodian from an NGO in his response to theprobing question of whether he thought Cambodia was now a safeplace.

But, my wife said no, we don’t trust the bank, she said, because ifsome day something happens, what does this ‘somethinghappens’ mean? It means fighting. It is not an unstable societynow, but it is the feeling . . . She has the mindset of running, soready to run. If we are going to run tomorrow or tonight becauseof fighting, what kinds of baskets are we going to bring with us?People are still like this. Many people are like this . . . especiallyold generation, they have that.

It is in periods prior to those where citizens have reached asufficient level of education and awareness to be able to participatein, and become an autonomous part of, good governance, that therole of government becomes significant in facilitating thatparticipation. Sen (1999) argued that in situations of choice, andeven in extreme choices between tradition and modernity wherethe former way of life may need to be sacrificed to escape fromgrinding poverty, it should not be political rulers or culturalexperts, either domestic or foreign, but the people themselves,directly involved, who must have the opportunity to participate indeciding what should be done. Furthermore, when they are askedto make such decisions, they should be informed of all thealternatives and, once a choice has been made, be given the meansto realise it. Ideally, good governance will arise where thegovernment and its policies are reflexive about what is drivingpeople’s choices given their circumstances (e.g., where a poorerchild’s labour is tolerated by the excuse of poverty). This wouldfacilitate an environment where the equal opportunity for eachand every child to engage in education is fully realised, regardlessof their circumstances.

7. Conclusion

This paper has considered how the issue of child labour islocated in Cambodian education policy debates and how these areaffected by the major constraints surrounding the Cambodianeducation sector. In particular, it has asked why Cambodianeducation policy makers have neglected child labour as asignificant barrier to achieving universal basic education. In doingso, it discussed two key issues. The first was the education sector’spassive approach to child labour, leaving it as a matter to beresolved by wider economic development. This was associatedwith the ease by which the poverty discourse has served to keepthe issue of child labour, despite its considerable negative impactson children’s school education, on the sidelines. The second issueconcerned how the major constraints surrounding the Cambodianeducation sector helped sustain a wide gap between educationpolicy and practice. In particular, major challenges includingwidespread corruption, insufficient national revenue and the lowmotivation and abilities of people in civil/public service have madethe implementation of education policies difficult. As a result,those who suffer the most from ineffective and/or unfulfillededucation policy promises are ultimately children, especially thosewho are missing a school education entirely, or whose educationaloutcomes are negatively affected, from being involved in work.

In conclusion, considering the complexity of the factors thatinfluence the incidence of child labour and children and theirparents’ decisions to choose school education, no one can beabsolutely sure what policy approaches and measures will be themost successful in eliminating child labour and achieving universalbasic education. But, one can be sure that in almost every case,greater political will and good governance will definitely make alarge difference in expediting the change.

Acknowledgements

For this paper I am indebted to all the people who kindly gaveup their time to respond to my incessant queries during thefieldwork in Cambodia, especially Ms Persy So, then Chief of theEducation Section, UNICEF Cambodia, who lost her life during herservice to children in Pakistan in 2009. I would also like to expressmy appreciation to the helpful comments of the reviewers at IJED.Finally I am very grateful to Dr Andrew Meads of the Equality andHuman Rights Commission, UK for his valuable comments and forproofreading the manuscript.

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