Young Generation For Development "YGD"

Mr. Soksan HING spoke to students and their parents

Young Generation for Development (YGD) is a newly-established group whose members were former contestants of the reality show, Youth Leadership Challenge, co-organized by Youth Council of Cambodia (YCC) and TV5. Read and Listen VOA interview by Mr. Soksan HING and Ms. Socheata HENG.

YGD was created on May 16, 2007 and there are 16 members. With an intent to help improve the Cambodian society and to work with young people to drive them to actively participate in social activities as well as to avoid using drugs, to study hard, to be best youth and to enjoy life with safety and healthiness, especially we would like to make the children liking and loving the reading and learning to avoid illiteracy. Please view the YGD's in Brief--Khmer and English.

Therefore, we have decided to work cooperatively together in order to achieve our group’s goal. One of the Cambodia Millenium Development Goals (CMDGs) is to ensure all chidren complete primary schooling by 2010 and nine-year basic schooling by 2015. Although the country has made progress in increasing access to basic education in recent years, there is a long way to go to reach the targets set under the CMDGs.

In order to ensure the increase in admission rate and decrease in the drop out of school, a number of factors need to be considered such as free admission, motivation for teachers to teach and sufficient facilities/equipment. Although the free admission has been practiced, there is still a lack of motivation for teachers due to low salary.

Moreover, with limited facilities, especially for students, there is still difficulty for them to study. With the intention of training children to like reading and to get access to studying materials, our team has decided to launch a project of bringing books for libraries of some schools in various provinces along with half-day forums to broadcast the bad impact of illiteracy.

In the occasion of bringing books to open the libraries at some primary schools, YGD will conduct the half-day forum. We will invite students’ parents to participate in, so that they can become the part of students’ learning, i.e. to know the benefits of reading and to push their children to read books more often either at home or at school especially, to make the students liking and loving the reading and learning to avoid illiteracy.

In the meantime, the YGD members conducted a role-play (short drama) about the advantages of reading because the reading would help children to improve their critical thinking, cleverness, broad knowledge and dignity especially they will be regarded as role-modal children in their community as well as society. After finishing the role-play we also called on all parents or guardians of students to send their children to school as a phrase said that “sending children to school means saving property for children.

YGD Source of Fund: After establishing the working group (YGD) already on June 2007, we primarily started our project by raising fund and asking books and other materials and stationeries from NGOs, bookshops, businesspeople, seller, elder students and other charitable people. Recently we just get fund from International Republican Institute in Cambodia and other charitable people especially from Mr. Gregory F. Lawless, first secretary of U.S embassy to Cambodia. View YGD's project proposal.

Until now we conducted ten forums and opened nine libraries at various rural-primary-schools in the following provinces:

1. 5 libraries for Kompong Cham province
2. 2 libraries for Pursat province
3. 2 libraries for Prey Veng province
4. 1 library for Takeo province

Please view the minutes to learn more YGD activities: Khmer [1] [2] [3] [4] [5], English and click here to see pictures.