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Op-Ed: Strengthening Technical Skills to Support Cambodia’s Economic Transformation and Gender Inclusion
- Apr 4
- 6 min read
Junior Research Fellow
Future Forum's research fellow Saly Mikavaty was published in Cambojanews on April 4th, 2026. Check out the original article HERE, and read it below!
With 8% average growth from 1998-2019, Cambodia ranked 8th in the world, with a low and stable rate of inflation. However, its economic growth slowed down to around 4.5% due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent war with Thailand, making it more constrained for Cambodia to achieve its strategic goals of becoming an upper middle-income country by 2030, and a high-income by 2050, as well as to be in a position to graduate from the category of Least Developed Countries by 2029. This transformation from traditional agriculture to agri-food processing, industry, and services increases the demand for a technical-skilled workforce to drive innovation, productivity growth, and integration into global value chains. At the same time, Cambodia’s demographic and labor market structure presents an opportunity for women to represent a substantial share of the workforce and will be central to meeting future skills demand. However, without targeted investment in high-quality higher education that focuses on technical training, Cambodia risks both persistent skills shortages and a continued underutilization of female human capital in technical fields once it has graduated from its status as an LDC.
The Current Inadequacies and Inequalities in Higher (Technical) Education
The Cambodian government has been committed to improving quality education from urban to rural areas, and mostly from primary school to high school, according to the latest data from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport. However, Cambodia is still hampered by several sectors that have limited capacity to improve, especially in higher-level education, which suffers from a shortage of qualified lecturers. Many educators still lack sufficient subject matter expertise and pedagogical skills, largely due to limited access to qualified pre-service and in-service training. Moreover, professional development opportunities remain irregular, fragmented, and often theoretical rather than practice-based. As a result, lecturers struggle to apply modern student-centered teaching methods that support critical thinking and fundamental research methodologies.
Besides lower-qualified lecturers, there are also other factors that contribute to these gaps, including insufficient instructional time and limited learning resources to support students during their academic years. This shortfall results in lower learning outcomes among students and highlights systemic weaknesses in Cambodia’s Education System (New Developments and Persistent Challenges). The fact that many learners consistently do not achieve grade-level proficiency in literacy, numeracy, science, and research leads to a lack of understanding of markets and skills needed within their field of studies, which limits their capacity to compete in the job market. Additionally, the curriculum in many subjects remains outdated, emphasizing rote memorization instead of practical skills aligned with Cambodia’s evolving labor market needs. The slow pace of curriculum reform and the lack of digital learning integration continue to hinder students’ preparedness for higher education. As Cambodia is transforming its economy into a higher industrial country to reach its ambition of transitioning to a high-income country by 2050, the Cambodian government should take proactive action to reform lecturer qualifications as well as the learning curriculum in order to strengthen quality education in Cambodia in the technical field.
Moreover, the low enrolment of female students in technical and higher education is another significant barrier. By 2030, 50% of university graduates in Cambodia are expected to major in technical fields, with 40% of those graduates being females, according to Cambodia’s Science, Technology & Innovation (STI) Roadmap 2030 (national STI roadmap 2030). Nonetheless, the number of Cambodian female students remains low when compared to other nations in the region, despite government attempts to support technical education and careers. Indeed, they are more likely to pursue social classes instead, due to the persistence of social norms, limited access to information, and weak institutional support, which all contribute to these constraints. Women are discouraged from enrolling in technical professions because such professions are seen as male-dominated, and the lack of career counselling and labor market information lowers understanding of the financial potential that these fields represent. Additionally, gender-responsive facilities and support services are often lacking in higher education institutions, which makes it more challenging for women, especially female students from rural areas, to enroll in, stay in, and finish technical programs.
What Policy Recommendations Should be Proposed to Address These Challenges?
To accelerate Cambodia’s economic transformation, strengthening the quality of higher education that focuses on technical training is crucial, particularly as the Cambodian government seeks to transition toward a high-skill, innovation-driven economy, while gender responsiveness should be considered to ensure that women are not excluded from high-skilled sectors. This policy suggestion will further contribute to existing national policies in the field, aiming to make them more practical than theoretical.
Reforming technical higher education curricula to align with initiatives to upgrade industry, enhance learning outcomes and strengthen professor qualifications and skills are all top proposals that the government should consider. Although competency-based learning is emphasized in current government programs, it has not yet been fully implemented in universities. The national higher education curriculum standards that support digital literacy, industrial-based competencies, and critical thinking research methodologies should be developed more quickly by the Ministry of Education Youth and Sport (MoEYS). To implement these developments, industrial science and technology-relevant universities should develop course frameworks that incorporate more practicum-based, student-centered methods. The MoEYS should increase the required pre-service and in-service training programs for university lecturers that concentrate on pedagogy, curriculum design, assessment techniques, and research supervision so as to facilitate this change. In order to do so, the Cambodian government should expand collaboration with regional and international universities and research centers that can assist in creating and promoting top-notch training programs that are in line with Cambodia’s strategic commitment to increase the quality of higher education.
Besides addressing quality education, the government should put in place specific access and retention policies for women, especially those from rural areas and underprivileged backgrounds. In order to boost female enrolment and completion in technical higher education, it would be recommended to create mentorship programs that connect female students with women professionals working in technical and engineering sectors (if possible) and enhance gender-responsive campus infrastructure, such as providing safe dorms and sanitary facilities. Moreover, providing scholarships is another incentive to encourage women to enrol.
Lastly, the Cambodian government should also strengthen gender-sensitive guidance and information relating to careers and labor markets in order to properly educate female students about their prospects in technical and high-growth job markets. Structured career counseling that emphasizes job opportunities, earning potential, and career trajectories should be incorporated into educational institutions. To implement this counselling, collaborations with private enterprises, women’s associations and local communities can reduce gender barriers to work and increase awareness that technical occupations are appealing and feasible for women. Improving access to relevant information would support informed study choices and align female participation with current and future labor market demand.
Key Constraints to Implement This Policy
Some may argue that expanding gender-responsive measures alongside technical education reforms could increase fiscal pressures and implementation complexity, particularly given existing capacity constraints within higher education institutions. Still others may contend that improving overall education quality should take precedence, with labor market participation determined primarily by individual choice. In addition, Cambodia will also face budget constraints to implement these initiatives, such as modern training materials, instructor capacity building, outreach programs and monitoring systems, as well as retraining staff. These financial burdens may cause concern for the Cambodian government to reform and implement this initiative effectively and efficiently. However, without targeted measures to address gender-specific barriers, investment in technical education risks benefiting only a limited segment of the population. Integrating gender inclusion into overall reforms relating to the quality of higher education is therefore not a parallel agenda but a necessary condition for maximizing returns on human capital development and meeting Cambodia’s future skills demand.
Final Policy Reflection
A high number of students pursuing higher education in a country does not alone indicate that that country boasts a quality education. Quality education here means that students experience a rigorous education curriculum with an organized quality learning structure and real training beside just traditional classroom learning. As a developing country that has transformed its lower-skill industries into higher ones, developing and reforming the teacher curriculum to strengthen student academic results and research development and to promote gender inclusion in technical fields, Cambodia can enable its students, especially female students, to be more skilled, productive and competitive.
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