The Development Research Forum of Cambodia recently held a conference entitled “Getting Education Right for Cambodia’s Changing Labour Market Needs: Reform and Policy Research Priorities” at the massive Hotel Cambodiana in Phnom Penh. During a Plenary Session entitled “Public-Private Partnerships for Quality Labour-Market Responsive Education in Cambodia – What needs to be done? What are the policy reform research implications?” a Labor Ministry spokesman Heng Sour, who is the director general of administration and finance, said:

I agree that the government must take responsibility to produce skilled workers…but it is also [in] the interest of the private sector to acknowledge that if they invest a dollar in a skilled worker or in productivity improvement, the return on their investment is higher.

So why does the government sector still need to stick to the classic principle that lets government alone do [this]?

Although Cambodia is a little late to the public-privte partnership party compared to other countries (for example, the Moroccan government was recently challenged over its privatisation efforts at a meeting of the UN committee on the Rights of the Child), it seems a shift is underway within the Royal government that will produce an increased level of, and reliance on, the private sector to provide educational services. This is relatively new because historically, at least since the early 1990s, privatisation was mainly informal—that is, various public school costs were passed to households in the form of fees, such as private tutoring costs paid directly to public schoolteachers in order to increase meagre salaries. Heng Sour is hinting at a totally different type of educational privatisation that is, at best, nascent: for-profit companies spending money on education. I suspect we’ll hear similar language in the near future and eventually see policy reforms that will allow for an increased role of private, for-profit companies in education.