Transforming School Libraries to Revitalize Education in Cambodia

Libraries play a crucial role in schools, serving as a cornerstone for educational development and intellectual growth. The space not only acts as storage of books, but also an inspiration to hearten students’ passion for reading, nurture their critical thinking and provide access to numerous information and resources that could be beneficial for their learning. The library compliments the educational curriculum through being a gateway for teachers and students to creatively design their learning based on their preferences. It has a significant impact toward schools as it helps students to develop their reading and researching skills and foster their curiosity and creativity.

Education in Cambodia has undergone significant changes for the last few decades. The Cambodia government and ministry of education has continued to make progress in rebuilding human resources through providing children access to schools nationwide. However, challenges remained as education quality in the rural area hasn’t met up with the goal due to limited infrastructure and shortage of highly trained teachers. One key component of the school that needs to be utilized properly is libraries. School libraries in Cambodia are essential in keeping resources that might be useful for students and teachers. With that being said, it can be seen across schools that the system of the library wasn’t organized and incorporated efficiently to what was expected. This particular problem became the central goal of the Kizuna school library project. Kizuna’s library project has the mission to help improve the library system and give training to librarians and the school director.  Partnering with Kizuna, iMPACT STORY was able to create 6 instructive video tutorials on how to set up a functional library system and see how it has been implemented in Koh Kong. 

With the video, the librarian has an excellent system that they can replicate and implement to their school’s library. These instructive videos will act as a guideline for schools all across the country who are in need of how to properly set up their library system. With the system in work and fully functional, it gives both teachers and students the access to resources which can aid in their learning. Through our time in creating the tutorial videos, we have also learned about the process of how books were transferred and the detailed steps librarians need to follow in order to receive those books and put them on the shelf. The system was well organized but isn’t well known to the general school library across the country. This is an important step in implementing this technical system which was incorporated by major libraries around the world. Seeing communities being impacted by the videos made us realize the inspiration we could bring with the action that we take. 

We at iMPACT STORY believe that education is the rightful guide into achieving an individual’s best qualities and a civilized nation. With an effective library system being ready to assist the school community, the learning journey will be fruitful and influential to the change agent in the classroom. Such an inclusive environment will allow kids to explore diverse fields of studies, gain different knowledge on such topics that the classroom might miss to cover.