The Cambodia country strategy fits into the national development strategy, which has recently focused more on human capital development, considering the knowledge-based economy and information technology. The following main themes are identified for all future interventions in cooperation with Cambodia:
- Education. Sub-themes: access and quality of education, ‘train-the-trainer’ approach, teacher education, lab training, practice-based curricula, etc. came forward as an important added value for university cooperation for development.
- Health. Sub-themes: mainly public and preventive health and access to medicines, link with medical training, general pathology, cancer research, diabetes, mental and physical disabilities (post-conflict related, road-safety accidents, ..), etc. were mentioned.
- Rural development and agriculture. Sub-themes: sustainable agriculture, aquaculture, fishery, food patterns, link with spatial planning rural-urban, link with private sector development.
- Governance and sustainable development. Sub-themes: rural-urban (spatial) planning, heritage and development linked with sustainable tourism (heritage sites in Cambodia), social economy, post-conflict and development, multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies, basic infrastructure & governance related to issues like road safety, democratization, human rights, gender….
- Environment. Sub-themes: biodiversity, wildlife, climate change linked to flooded areas (delta of Mekong, etc.), natural resources management, sustainable tourism.
The country strategy identifies the following main transversal and cross-cutting themes:
- Scientific thinking (hypothesis-driven research)
- Academic English
- Teacher training
- Institutional capacity building (incl. in terms of educational/curriculum development)
- ITS (ICT and applications, big data, digitalisation)
The transversal and priority themes of the Belgian government (gender, environmental sustainability, digitalisation for development, human rigths approach and private sector links) were also brought up and are taken into account within the clusters.