Proposed strategies to strengthen community participation in community learning centers in The Kingdom of Cambodia
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Abstract
This descriptive research aims to propose strategies to strengthen community participation in community learning centers (CLCs) in the Kingdom of Cambodia. This research study contains two phases of procedures: 1) to explore the issues of community participation in CLCs in Cambodia by conducting the semi-structured interview and doing observation with Cambodian experts and 2) to identify strategies to strengthen community participation in CLCs in Cambodia by interviewing, analyzing, and synthesizing previous and current policies, strategies, mechanisms and the discourses of the Cambodian experts. The study revealed the following results. There are many problems of community participation which are caused by two main actors such as government levels (the lack of facilities and transparency, conventional teaching curriculum, the limited knowledge of facilitators, and administrative staff, shortage of allocated budgets, no clear career pathway and deficiency of disseminating information) and grass-rooted levels (the lack of understanding about CLCs, trust, and sense of belonging, family's burdens, caring about their businesses, traditional cultures, and migration). Moreover, there are also many suitable strategies, such as monthly diagnosing needs with community people, strengthening leaderships and facilitator's capacity building, disseminating enough information, increasing resource mobilization, updating their teaching curriculum, linking one CLC to others, having a clear career pathway for participants, and putting the problems of community people into solution.
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