Before
she dropped out of school in April, following her cousin to a factory in
Thailand where a week of making mattresses pays $48, Dong Sreyda was ranked
third in her ninth grade class in Banteay Meanchey province.
“I wanted
to study so much, until I graduated from high school, but my parents don’t have
the money to support my education,” the 16-year-old said last week.
For
Sreyda’s family, the nearly $300 needed for a year of school fees, materials
and extra courses was unaffordable after their rice harvest came up short
following the recent drought.
The high
cost of schooling, coupled with poverty and the lure of foreign employment,
make staying in the classroom a difficult choice for students and their
families, especially in rural areas.
According
to data released Friday by the Unesco Institute for Statistics, poverty is a
“significant barrier” to students receiving an education in Cambodia, where
160,000 children in grades 7 to 9 did not attend school in 2014—a striking 17
percent of children in that age range.
Last year
alone, the Ministry of Education recorded a 19.2 percent dropout rate among
those in seventh through ninth grades, accounting for 104,962 of the 546,678
students that enrolled in the grade group during the 2014 to 2015 academic
year.
Despite
the Thai military junta’s 2014 crackdown on foreign workers, which required
migrants to obtain official documentation in order to work across the border,
the lure of employment in Thailand has held strong. Helen Sworn, the
international director of anti-trafficking organization Chab Dai, said that
although there were no reliable statistics on the number of workers who go to
Thailand, by all accounts migration was on the rise.
“We’ve
definitely seen an increase, especially of late teens and young adults…so if you
go around the border, you’ll see there’s almost nobody” in that age range
remaining, she said.
Sreyda’s
former school, Chhouk High School in O’Chrou district’s Changha commune, is
located in one of those border areas being rapidly depleted of young people.
The school’s dropout rate has jumped significantly in the face of Thailand’s
economic pull, said principal Ouch Makara.
“The
problem now is getting worse than in previous years,” he said.
Last
year, 52 students completed 8th grade, Mr. Makara said, and for many, that was
the end of their days in the classroom. This year, only seven of the 52
returned to school for ninth grade, “but two have just dropped out,” he said.
Sreyda, he added, was one of the latest.
Pring
Morkoath, deputy director of the Ministry of Education’s secondary education
department, said the problem stretches along the border, where Thai business
owners are locating their companies in order to attract Cambodian workers.
“In
Thailand, they say they need much manpower, especially from Cambodia or Myanmar
or other areas,” he said, adding that migrating to Thailand “is easy compared
to other countries.”
Parents
who have relocated to Thailand often encourage their children to join them, Mr.
Morkoath said, adding that this also has an effect on secondary school dropout
rates.
Thailand’s
higher wages are a huge draw. While most Cambodians working in Thailand have
low-level jobs as construction or factory workers, those who have completed
seventh to ninth grades can get a job earning around $250 per month—similar to
an entry-level job in Cambodia for a university graduate, Mr. Morkoath said.
The
students’ shortsightedness about their education is “a big problem for us,” he
said. “They don’t care about how it [will be] in the future. They say ‘in the
current time,’” he said.
According
to Vorn Samphors, country director for Aide et Action, an NGO focusing on
education, the lagging interest in secondary education is a reflection of an
education system that remains weak despite recent attempts to improve teacher
training and curriculum standards, and to eradicate improper school fees and
rampant corruption surrounding the national high school exam.
“Our
education system is not yet able to ensure, convince, and motivate [students]
that to continue one year of education, three years of education, five years of
education really improves the production, improves the living conditions for
their future,” he said.
Because
of this, he said, students choose “to move for the economic reasons in the short
term, rather than try to pursue an education.”
According
to a Unesco report released in February, an estimated $68 million in potential
income is lost to the national economy annually due to primary and secondary
students not completing their education. That’s more than 7 percent of the
estimated $500 million national education budget for 2016, according to
Education Minister Hang Chuon Naron.
While the
government does not collect data on how many school dropouts go to work in
Thailand, Mr. Chuon Naron said the government recognized this as a problem and
was working to mitigate the consequences, including the “loss of human
resources.”
“We want
them to get an education and work in Cambodia, so I think it is a concern, in
general, for Cambodian development,” he said. “For that reason, the ministry
has introduced job counseling…to prevent job dropout and migration and to
provide information on what they should study” in order to find well-paying
jobs in their own country.
The job
counseling program will become part of the country’s teacher training program
in the near future, Mr. Chuon Naron said, after a pilot project is completed in
Battambang province, “where there is a high migration rate since it’s near
Thailand.”
But
doubts remain as to whether government efforts will be sufficient to stem
dropout rates and employment migration. Miguel Chanco, lead analyst in the
Asean region for the Economist Intelligence Unit, said the government’s current
investment in education and low-cost labor approach would not be enough to
allow Cambodia to compete economically with other Southeast Asian countries.
“Public
spending on education in absolute terms has risen noticeably over the past few
years, but there is still a lot of scope for Cambodia’s government to dedicate
more of its admittedly thin resources to this critical area,” he said in an
email. “Indeed, as a percentage of total government expenditure, the proportion
of funds devoted to education in Cambodia lags far behind those of its peers in
Asean.”
While
Cambodia’s economy will continue to grow with the aid of foreign investment,
ensuring that this growth is felt across society will be a challenge—and one
that a strengthened education sector could relieve, he said.
“Time is
not on the government side, as the country’s current low labor-cost growth
model will be increasingly replicated and challenged by nearby countries.”
(Additional
reporting by Alex Willemyns)
Janelle
Retka and Samoeurth Seavmeng
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