Gender equality programme rolled out in Kingdom’s north

This article is on a programme called “Girls Lead” launched by the Cambodian chapter of an NGO, Plan International, aimed at empowering youths to counter gender inequality in their communities. The project was brought to three provinces in Cambodia—Siem Reap, Stung Treng and Ratanakiri—on a budget of US$2.9million, in an effort  to help youths aged 12-17 “learn, share, create and lead efforts to promote social development and gender equality in Cambodia”. The article mentions the leadership of the organisation, PIC country director Jan Jaap Kleinrensink, voicing his optimism for the programme’s success and sustainability. Furthermore, it attempts to situate the initiative in the larger context of gender equality in Cambodia:

“The Kingdom has made progress within the gender equality scope in many sectors. However, collective efforts are still required to solve the remaining problems – especially pertaining to peoples’ mindsets towards gender roles in society.”

Something that struck me as I was reading this article was the relationship between foreign and local aid in the country. The NGO is an international organisation led by a non-Cambodian—a cursory search on the internet revealed to me that the director of PIC is from the Netherlands. Yet, I wonder how reflective this foreign leadership is of the people making up the NGO and the way the organisation operates. Another dimension to the topic if that the programme is so intentionally aimed at bringing the activism to the local communities by motivating its youths to promote social causes. Perhaps it suggests that for the impact of “aid” to be sustainable, the change has to come from within the community as opposed to mere foreigners attempting to enforce change.

On a more personal note, my suite-mate is from Siem Reap, which was what prompted me to turn to the Phnom Penh Post for this assignment. She went to a Cambodian school set up by Americans, which supposedly gave her opportunities to complete her high school education in Switzerland before coming to Yale-NUS. Once before, she had told me that her high school principal was an American who would clearly favour the foreign teachers over the Cambodian ones even though she thought the Cambodian teachers were far more capable. When I showed her this article, and asked her about her thoughts on bearing in mind her own education, she commented that “white people funded it, but the Cambodians built it”. Her response essentially captured some of the ideas I was trying to make sense of—how many are locals working to improve their community throughout the NGO work or maybe even just trying to pay their bills with whatever job they could find? Does the “foreign”-quality of the NGO impact the work they do in Cambodia?—the values they try to inculcate, the attitude the workers carry, the knowledge they have about local culture?