Cambodia : Can Transparency and Incentives for Community Participation Increase the Supply of Textbooks to Schools?
The textbook supply chain in Cambodia has several weak points. Book forecasting can take many months, as schools report their book needs to district or cluster officers who then collate all the requirements of the schools within their jurisdiction...
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| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2020
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/101631591937029004/Cambodia-Can-Transparency-and-Incentives-for-Community-Participation-Increase-the-Supply-of-Textbooks-to-Schools http://hdl.handle.net/10986/33916 |
| Summary: | The textbook supply chain in Cambodia
has several weak points. Book forecasting can take many
months, as schools report their book needs to district or
cluster officers who then collate all the requirements of
the schools within their jurisdiction and report them to the
national government. This process is also not well aligned
with the government budgeting processes which further
exacerbates delays. Schools fill out paper-based forms with
complex formulae to determine the number of books the
schools need, making the process prone to errors. The
distribution of books is also a time-consuming process and
prone to error. When the books are printed and dispatched,
district or cluster officials receive a bulk allocation for
all their schools and are then required to collate and
repackage the books destined for each school, which
introduces a risk of error. Then the school directors (or
headteachers) collect their schools’ books from the district
and report the receipt of the books using a complex paper
receipt template, which is time-consuming to complete and
also prone to error. As a result of these weaknesses in the
supply chain new textbooks often do not reach schools on
time or in the correct quantities. In the baseline for this
study, only around 65 percent of school directors surveyed
reported having adequate numbers of textbooks for key
subjects, and 45 percent did not receive their books in time
for the start of the school year. Consequently, it is
estimated that more than 2 million primary school students
in Cambodia face a chronic lack of good quality textbooks. |
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