Background of the Event
Royal Government of Cambodia
National Information Communications Technology
Development Authority (NiDA)
UNESCO # 18312503CAM
1. Background
Globalization is at our doorstep; Cambodia has a choice either to ignore the process or to participate and reap the benefit of globalization. Obviously, Cambodia has chosen the latter as evidenced by the formation of the National Information Communications Technology Development Authority (NiDA) on August 23rd, 2001 (www.nida.gov.kh)
The benefit of globalization includes effective mobilizations of limited and specialized resources and borderless world. People with specialized skill can be mobilized from one side of the globe to another without traditional constraint, such as time and space. Thus, productivity will be raised accordingly. These benefits are assured for people with the right skills. For people without the right skill, globalization will only widen the existing economic gap and creates further burden on the society.
To prevent economic gap from widening and creates further burden on the society, proper education for the vulnerable group such women and children shall be addressed while keeping in mind that education-for-all shall be the basis for poverty reduction as a whole. The vulnerable group can integrate into the mainstream society with proper skill set only while Cambodia as a whole can integrate into the world community and participate in the global economy with the right knowledge and right skill sets.
Cambodians will need to learn how to network, how to make the best use of the existing research and how to spread information to the mass, that is Cambodians need to learn how to make the best use of Information Communications Technology for the current development objectives.
2. Objectives
NiDA has its simple objectives; that is to create a fertile pool of IT experts to meet the need of Cambodia.
Our first and foremost objective is to build basic IT skill workforce to meet the need of the society and then move on to build advanced IT skill workforce later. The first group consists of government officials handle the day-to-day operation of their respective departments and rural schoolteachers
The objective of this national workshop is to promote awareness and to selectively choose candidates with the highest chance of success for follow up training in hope that these candidates will replicate this same training once they return to their constituencies.
3. Strategies
In order to effectively achieve our objective, a national workshop to promote awareness in basic IT education is conducted by NiDA with the assistance of UNESCO. Participants to this workshop will include government officials who will need basic IT education to improve their daily performance and rural schoolteachers who will go back to teach in their respective schools. Through this workshop, one hundred and eighty candidates out of the four hundreds participants will be invited to a two-month (forty hours in-class) basic office application training at NiDA. The candidates will be divided into six groups of 30 persons each.
Participants to the training program will be selected based on their performance and their vital role in promoting IT education. Government officials who have used IT at work and will need IT to improve their works are candidates for this program and rural schoolteachers who have taught computers and/or will teach computers at their school once they have finished their training at NiDA will also be the candidates.
The training will be focused on basic office applications such as windows basic, word, excel, power point, internet access and email.
4. Impacts
Impacts from this program include better workflow of government work because documents will be produced by computers, which result in better processing and filing. Also, rural school teachers could play a vital role in introducing computers to rural students. Currently, computer is not part of the vocabulary in rural schools.
5. Beneficiaries
The performance of this project will benefit, first of all, the general public; which include women and children. The one-day workshop will create awareness among the general public of the importance of the IT education. The second group to benefit from this project will be government officials at all ministries. This group of people will be likely to continue with the follow up training. The third group will be rural teachers. All these teachers will be able to convey what they have learnt in the workshop and in the follow up training to their students in rural school.
6. Outputs
The national workshop will promote awareness in IT education, better inter-departmental communication and groundwork for fertile pool of IT experts.
Participants to the national workshop consist of government officials, teachers, IT companies and experts from different organizations. Government officials with basic office application training will be able to produce better documents, better inter-departmental communications and finally better government image. Rural schoolteachers with basic office application training will be able to convey the training to rural students and to lay the groundwork for fertile pool of IT experts in Cambodia.
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