Siem Reap in Cambodia is a province well known for its beautiful scenery, historic culture and thriving tourist industry. Most tourists flock to the main city, Siem Reap to use as a base from which to explore the wider area.
However, for local people the beautiful external story hides deeper troubles. Multi-dimensional poverty issues affect the indigenous people of both the city and more rural areas, complicated by the tourist industry which has driven up prices of produce and trade for local people.
The mismanagement of tourist volunteer programmes by some external NGO’s has complicated community responses to poverty issues and had a detrimental effect on local ability to develop economically and socially in accord with their indigenous ideas and culture.
Our partners have introduced supplementary schools in rural villages that will educate children who have to work in the fields for their parents instead of attended mainstream school.

• Implementation of a teacher training programme for local Khmer volunteers teachers so that the small rural communities do not have to rely on the tourist volunteer system for this purpose.
• Improvement of the resources available to the supplementary schools to aid the delivery of the curriculum and to maximise the learning opportunities of over 800 children.
• Implementation of a volunteer scheme in the future to increase manpower in other areas of village life which will support programmes designed by local people.

• In 2010 we took our first visit to Siem Reap in order to work with our local parteners to develop a culturally sensitive and exciting curriculum for the children attending the supplementary schools.
• We have funded a local teacher trainer to deliver the training programme for the local student teachers to enable them to start teaching at the schools.
• We have also bridge-funded the group of local teachers salaries for the first 6 months after graduation until the volunteer scheme is up and running which will generate the income to sustainably pay the salaries in the future.

This volunteer programme has now ended. Please visit our Volunteer page for information on our current volunteer programmes.

You can also subscribe to our RSS Feed and you will be automatically updated on all our volunteering opportunities as they are made available.