Khmer Children's Education Organization Online

What We Do

The challenges we face:

KCEO serves the villages in Baribour District, Kampong Chhnang Province, in Central Cambodia. This is traditionally a rice farming area, irrigated by the seasonal flows of the nearby Tonle Sap. In past decades, small-holder family farming has become more and more difficult. Families are faced with rapidly fluctuating agricultural prices, national recession, and environmental/ecological change, including drought, record-highs in heat year after year, and cratering fish populations from dam construction. 

Opportunities outside of small-scale agriculture are few and far between: post-COVID, the only factory in the area closed, taking away over a thousand manufacturing jobs. As traditional farming becomes no longer enough to stay afloat, many of our students’ families have been forced into debt.

The KCEO solution:

Education is the key that unlocks lasting change

Our young people are capable and hardworking. Students can and do find success at university, in higher paying service-sector jobs, and in international jobs in South Korea and Vietnam, which pay many times more than equivalent work in Cambodia. With these jobs, they not only pursue better lives for themselves, but support families, and often move back home with savings and skills to build businesses without going into heavy debt.

Students work incredibly hard to pursue these dreams. Hard work, unfortunately, isn’t enough – these opportunities only become possible with foreign language and computer skills.

However, education from government schools is inadequate

These schools are half day, and teachers are not paid a full-time salary, forcing them to work other jobs and often miss class. Students only receive basic instruction in math and Khmer.

KCEO addresses this gap by providing Monday through Friday primary and secondary schooling, where students take classes in English, Khmer, math, and computer literacy. After finishing secondary school, students may enroll in KCEO Korean-language classes, equipping them to pass government exams which regulate entry into high-paying South Korean jobs.

Khmer Children's Education Organization Online

KCEO provides, for many students, the only opportunity to learn how to use a computer. Learning typing skills and office-suite proficiency at an early age unlocks opportunities in university and in a modern economy.