Community Service

Community Service >> Rethinking Scholarships in Cambodia

By Barry Sutherland, Director International School Phnom Penh, barry sutherland@ispp.edu.kh

International School Phnom Penh (ISPP) has a long-established scholarship program with selection intended as a combination of merit and needs-based. Students would be tested on the merit side as early as Gr.2 and parents would complete a declaration regarding the needs side. These scholarships were offered to one lucky elementary child in alternate years anywhere between Gr. 2 and Gr. 5.

The day things changed for me was when I was informed that our latest scholarship recipient would be late enrolling for school because their family was currently on a vacation in Europe. We honored our agreement, but decided it was time to review our scholarship program with a view to providing opportunities for very poor students – the ones most international schools choose not to serve. What came next was inspiring, impactful and painful. But first you need to understand how we funded the new scholarship program.

Backstory ISPP has suffered a bit of financial trauma over the past 10 years to say the least. In 2007, the Board had signed over $3 million dollars to a local developer who, after the 2008 global financial market crash, could not deliver land for a new school. I arrived in 2009 and was tasked with retrieving the $3 million plus finding new land to buy and build a school upon. In 2011, the school was embroiled in a lawsuit over another failed land deal in which the developer was unwilling to release $2.5 million dollars of the school’s money held in escrow. This little fight was my responsibility for following only the first half of the golden rule: trust, but verify. In spite of these challenges, the school purchased land and began to build its current campus in 2012. The problem was there was no money to build it. to foreclose on a school (even bankers). As such, we had a difficult time getting a loan, but eventually a local bank took a chance on us with a $20 million construction loan at a very high variable rate. We were grateful to get a loan at any rate.

The new campus was completed in 2015 and the bank had already tried to raise the interest rate once (bankers; sigh) as was their right. We immediately contacted the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) in Washington as we had built a relationship with the OPIC Team since 2011, when I asked them to finance the construction. They said they would like to help but that with congressional approval taking a long time and the fact that our clients were wealthy, they said we had better go for private financing.

Flash forward to 2016 and I contacted OPIC again and proposed that they buy out our construction loan as a social development loan. The social development aspect is that I promised to plough all of the savings from a low-interest, long tenure fixed OPIC loan into a new type of scholarship program. The savings to our ISPP will be $2.3 million dollars over 15 years – more than enough to support a long term ISPP scholarship program for children from very impoverished families.

While it has taken two years to negotiate and perfect the buyout loan, it has been worth it because in August 2018, six very poor children joined ISPP on 7-year scholarships that start in Gr. 6 and ending with their IB Diploma in 2025.

How did we gauge the level of need? When we proposed to serve very poor children, we knew this was always going to be the biggest challenge. Given the nature of the family structure in SE Asia, we knew that if we could provide an ISPP education and eventually an IB Diploma we could not only pull that child out of poverty, but we would potentially pull up the whole

family. As such, we wanted to partner with a local NGO operating in the local education sector which worked with impoverished students AND with their families. We connected with the Cambodian Children’s Fund (CCF). You can Google them to learn about their amazing work in Phnom Penh. Knowing we would need to support the family to support these students, we hired a Social Worker (the first at an international school in Cambodia) at the beginning of 2018. This person has become the liaison between the school and our scholarship families and is also available to work with the rest of the ISPP community. Each of the families has both a CCF and an ISPP case worker.

Our vetting process was extensive. Our scholarship team, made up of dedicated teachers and administrators, spent six weeks getting to know the 19 Gr. 5 children who had been selected for testing from an original group of 185. We spent weekdays and weekends on rotation observing the students in their CCF classes and working on tests, puzzles and games on Saturdays. The difficult selection of the final six students was made and we created a 9-week transition program on the ISPP campus during our summer break, with the intent of allowing these children a running start in August. Our teachers are 100% on board and know that over a 7-year period they can shepherd any student through to an IB Diploma – if they couldn’t, maybe this line of work is not for them.

We have met the scholars’ parents who live in a part of Phnom Penh called Steung Meanchey, a former city dump site that still has a disused dump smoldering away in the middle of the community. It is a dangerous place where drug use, gambling and violence, domestic and otherwise, are rife. These parents work as garment factory workers and scavengers – people who drag handcarts through the streets of Phnom Penh at night and separate garbage by headlamp on the streets outside of fine restaurants (frequented mainly by parents and children like ISPP’s). When their cart is full they walk it back to warehouses in Steung Meanchey and receive a few dollars for the plastic, metal and cardboard they have scavenged – enough to buy some food. Next day: Repeat. To really make a social impact, their children were the ones we wanted to enroll at our school.

The main reason we worked with CCF is because they have a reputable network of schools which teach all subjects in English for half a day and the Khmer curriculum for the other half. As long as these students are in school, CCF provides the families with support – food program, housing, medical and dental, social and emotional counseling through a network of trained social workers. To access the ISPP IB curriculum, it was critical for us to ensure these students would join us early (Gr. 6) and would be supported in their community after they leave ISPP at the end of the school day.

Too hard? I want to conclude by telling you that any EARCOS school can set up a program like this if they really want to. All you need to do is to start and to not listen to the many people who will tell you it can never work. This included ISPP community members and colleagues from other regional international schools. Every criticism and warning was fear-based, which seems to be going around these days. Comments ranged from: You cannot partner with an NGO because of the reputational risk to your school,’’ to “How will you deal with child protection issue with ‘’these’’ children,’’ to ‘’Their English is too poor and your teachers will not be able to make them learn;’’ to a very helpful suggestion that we give the money to pay for scholarships to a local school and send these kids there (as if poverty is something other children might catch, like a cold). Our team found these comments both painful and inspirational.

Remember, the money is a not the issue. We can all afford to take in students from impoverished families; not just the local middle class kids who already have family support and a future. Is it harder to do what we have done?; sure, but most things that are innovative and have wide reaching social impact are. Sadly, I think the fact that I could say to a very small group of parents that this program will literally cost you nothing was more powerful than the impact the program is sure to have on their own children, allowed us to move forward – it is hard to argue against free. But in reality, it does not cost much to do the right thing.

If any schools would like to learn more about our program, including how we tested students and how we intend to get them all full ride university scholarships in 2025, please reach out. We are beginning our search for our 2nd cohort of six Gr. 6 students this semester to join us in 2019.