A new World Bank report warns that Cambodia must overhaul education financing, teacher management and governance to improve learning outcomes and support its goal of becoming a high-income country by 2050
The World Bank has urged Cambodia to undertake a comprehensive reform agenda to improve learning outcomes, stressing that addressing these challenges is essential if Cambodia aims to achieve its ambition of becoming a high-income country by 2050.
The World Bank report ‘Cambodia: Addressing Public Finance and Human Resource Bottlenecks to Education Outcomes’, released earlier this month, calls for a comprehensive reform agenda, outlining both short-term (one to two years) and medium-term (three to five years) measures.
Its recommendations span budget restructuring, teacher incentive reforms, streamlined procurement, greater school-level financial flexibility, and investment in an integrated data architecture.
“Addressing these bottlenecks in a coordinated manner is identified as essential if Cambodia is to achieve its ambition of becoming a high-income country by 2050,” it said.
The report was conducted between September and November 2024 across 18 schools in five provinces, finding that Cambodia has made substantial gains in school enrollment over the past two decades, yet these advances have not translated into improved learning outcomes.
It noted that the Kingdom’s net enrollment rates (NERs) for primary, lower- and upper-secondary education have improved substantially between 2001 and 2024, rising from 84.0 to 97.2 percent, 17 to 75.2 percent, and eight to 44.3 percent, respectively.
However, the report said learning outcomes have yet to show significant improvement, with national and international assessments finding that many Cambodian primary school students still lack basic literacy and numeracy skills needed to progress in education and secure high-skilled jobs in the future.
“For instance, Grade 6 students answered less than 52 percent of Khmer questions and under 50 percent of math questions correctly during the 2021 NLA,” it said, adding that significant improvements were observed during the SEAPLM 2024, where the number of students with low proficiency in reading and mathematics was significantly reduced from 24 percent and 16 percent in 2019 to 17 percent and eight percent in 2024, respectively.
“But, learning outcomes remain relatively low compared to regional peers like Vietnam and Malaysia, underscoring the need for further improvements,” it said, while pointing out the governance challenges that continue to constrain the quality of education service delivery.
The report, with a primary focus on the basic education level, said that Cambodia's education system remains significantly underfunded by the state, with households bearing approximately 59 percent of total education costs, while high wage expenditures, between 70 to 80 percent of the public education budget, have not yielded commensurate improvements in learning.
It found that structural weaknesses in Public Financial Management (PFM), Human Resource Management (HRM) and data governance are the binding constraints preventing the system from delivering quality education at scale.
The findings added that poor learning outcomes persist despite high spending on wages due to limited access to quality early childhood education; insufficiently trained and unevenly distributed teachers; inadequate support for students falling behind; large class sizes compounded by infrastructure deficits; shortages of key inputs such as textbooks; and fragmented, outdated management information systems.
2145.146 SRY
