| Child Protection and Education |
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BABC’s work in Cambodia initially focused on children and youth and our first project was to provide tetanus vaccinations for 400 children who were forced to eke out an existence scavenging at Phnom Penh’s municipal waste dump. This initiative led to the establishment of our Child Protection and Education (CPE) program, which aimed to protect the rights and dignity of poor and vulnerable children and expand their opportunities for education and personal development.
BABC has also helped rural communities to establish non-formal community-based education programs for children and youth. We began our first rural education efforts by supporting the Sylvia Lasky Memorial School in Pursat province, which was founded in 2001 by BAB Director Bruce Lasky in memory of his late mother. The Lasky School provides supplementary education to over 300 poor rural children, including English, math, science, computer and vocational training classes. Building on this model, we expanded our reach to impoverished communities in Kep, Takeo and the periphery of Phnom Penh to establish non-formal education programs, which now serve nearly a thousand children from thirteen villages with English, Khmer, mathematics, health and hygiene, arts, leadership and pre-school classes.
For more information on each of our education programs, follow the links below:
Kep Education Initiatives - Chamcar Bei
Back to Community Development Program
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Between 2003-2007, we recruited dozens of child sponsors and partnered with a local organization, the Center for Children’s Happiness (CCH), to provide a nurturing home, protection from harm and a quality education for former street children and waste collectors. BABC also continued to provide inoculations for thousands of children who lived and worked on the garbage dump in order to protect them against life-threatening diseases that they risked contracting in their dangerous workplace. In 2005, BABC supported CCH to buy land and build a second center so that more children could be given the opportunity to escape the horrors of life on the garbage dump. Many of the original students at CCH went on to receive scholarships to premier international schools in Cambodia and abroad, and one received a full scholarship to an American university in 2009. We are very proud of the role that we played in helping CCH to develop, expand and provide loving care and opportunities to over 150 children who had quite literally been thrown away by Cambodian society.
In 2007, our Child Protection and Education program made a strategic shift towards support for more community-based educational and harm reduction programs for children and youth still living on the streets or in impoverished urban communities. BABC partnered with Tiny Toones, a local group that teaches break-dancing and life skills to youth who are most at risk of drug related harm, HIV/AIDS, abuse and exploitation. With core funding and technical support from BABC since 2006, we have assisted Tiny Toones to establish two fully equipped drop-in centers and develop a non-formal education program with English, Khmer literacy and numeracy, computer skills, and drug and HIV prevention classes, alongside the expansion of its creative program to include music and visual arts. We also opened the Rudi Boa Center, a community education and outreach project developed first within Village 4 at Boueng Kak and later in the Borey Santepheap II relocation site 22 kilometers outside of Phnom Penh. The residents of Borey Santepheap II were forcibly resettled there after being evicted from their homes in Dey Krahorm and Boeung Kak to make way for private developments. By relocating the Rudi Boa Center, we continue to provide free classes to hundreds of the community’s children and parents in Khmer, English, basic health and sanitation, leadership and life skills. 
In addition to establishing and supporting non-formal education programs, we have also partnered with local education departments to promote and improve formal education. In the remote village of Ochrov in the Thpong district of Kampong Speu province, BABC constructed a five-room public primary school building and a teachers’ accommodation building and we facilitated the recruitment and training of five new teachers for Oda Primary School. Similarly, in Kep province, we partnered with one of the worst performing primary schools and successfully increased enrollment and improved the quality of education through teacher training and salary supplementation, school enrollment drives, and scholarships for poor children.