Let’s talk about the ‘boy problem’ – a subject that is increasingly of global concern as we see more and more young men disengaging from school and society. So far-reaching is this issue that it has entered the public discourse and our television screens with examinations of some of the pressures that boys can experience from their peers and the darker influences of online culture.
At PLF we have long seen that girls engage more with learning and are more likely to stay the distance through to secondary school. A fairly consistent rate of around 65% of our higher education scholarships are awarded to females. But in the early years of Covid, we began to notice that this gender gap was dramatically increasing, with an accelerating percentage of males dropping out in Jr High, and a declining percentage engaging in our programs. Research published by UNICEF in 2020 confirmed that it wasn’t just our boys – this phenomenon exists nationwide.
To fully understand the issues facing boys and how we could address them, we conducted extensive interviews with stakeholders across our locations. Our meetings with parents, male drop-out students as well as those still studying, teachers, and community members provided the following insights:
- In rural areas, middle school boys are faced with the “Earn vs Learn” dilemma and often pressured to bring in income to help with their family expenses
- Boys are allowed to socialize outside the home, girls are not. So while seeing friends at school is an extra pull for girls, boys can – and do – miss class to hang out with their friends
- There is a dearth of positive male role models in their communities, which are still affected by hereditary trauma from decades of civil war, and the ensuing obliteration of societal and educational structures
- Boys are motivated by competition and require more movement and tactile resources for learning
- Boys are more likely to drop out after falling behind academically
We recognize that working with these complex issues requires a multi-pronged approach. Informed by our research, we began to draw up a cross-program initiative, leveraging several projects that we believe will interest boys, with the goal of hanging on to them through middle school and into high school. These program touch-points include: the expansion of our STEM programs; bringing more competition and sports activities to our centers; addressing academic gaps through remedial classes and library resources; ensuring boys have regular contact with positive male role models; and focussing them on planning for the future through workshops and alternative higher education courses.
In 2024, it was great to see the Cambodia Development Research Institute publish a paper which mirrored our findings, and confirmed the validity of our strategy.
The chart shows the scale of male dropout rates in middle school at both PLF and nationwide (note that national data not yet available for 23-24). While we know that such a complex issue can’t be resolved overnight, we’re heartened to see that our cross-program strategy has begun to reverse this trend. We’re in for the long haul and will continue to monitor and refine our strategy as results unfold – ensuring that no one is left behind!
Read on for more detail of what’s involved in each program touch point:
STEM Expansion
We continue to develop our Explore Class which we started as a first step to addressing our boys problem, targeting the grades most at risk: Junior High students. The Explore curriculum brings project-based learning while building essential digital literacy and bolstering academic knowledge, and at the end of the 23-24 school year we graduated our first class from this 2-year program!
While the boys who do attend attest to the value of these classes, our male enrollment is still not where we want it to be, with seats filled by boys less than the percentage of eligible boys. One barrier to this has been our Khmer literacy requirement for joining the class, as too many boys haven’t been able to pass our (pretty low) threshold. In the 24-25 school year we are intentionally increasing male enrollment by lowering the required pass score; though there is significant risk to slowing the curriculum, we currently believe the benefit of encouraging more boys into the class outweighs the risk.
In 23-24 we also expanded our Science classes at Knar Learning Center in rural Siem Reap to our learning center in Srayang, Preah Vihear. This effectively doubled our reach in supplementing the bare-bones science curriculum that is taught purely by text book in government classes. Students get to explore the world around them in more detail with tactile, hands-on experiments around four key strands: Biomes, Outer Space, Human Anatomy and Physical Science. We are constantly adding more activities to the curriculum, such as this mapping project that a long-term volunteer trained our Khmer team to teach, so that they can continue to run this popular project independently.
Competition & Movement
Expanding Chess Clubs to four additional locations in early 2024 proved to be popular among our male students and beneficial for everyone. These included our learning centers in Preah Vihear and Siem Reap, as well as at the libraries of our two Preah Vihear primary schools. Librarians at the latter reported an increased engagement among the boys, not just in joining the class but also in borrowing books, which rose by 30% across the two primary locations in the 4 months that followed the introduction of the Clubs.
We also refined our annual Chess tournament, inviting students from the new learning center clubs to battle it out with regular players from Knar and Chey chess clubs. Consequently, boys dominated the top 10 winners with a male student from the new Srayang chess club taking 8th place!
Sports
In 2024, we also expanded our yearly Sports Day to again include the two Preah Vihear primary schools, which teachers and students alike LOVED. We will certainly run it again in 2025, and we believe holding this towards the end of the school year also gives an incentive for Grades 4-6 not to drop out earlier in the year if they want to join the fun.
Additionally, all our learning center locations have been trialing after-school monthly sports events where students across the grades can join and just have fun together. This includes badminton, football, tetherball, volleyball, basketball and frisbee. Phary, librarian at our Urban Learning Center in Siem Reap has noted an increase in boys coming to the library, as well as IT students coming before their classes and engaging more with the library. At Chey Learning Center, these have proved so popular that they are holding weekly sessions, and reporting that approximately 60% of students participating are boys.
Another competition that is showing good results is the Khmer Spelling Bee that Ravuth has introduced at Srayang Learning Center. Grade 7 competed amongst themselves, with Grades 8 & 9 cheering them on. Due to the positive response to this activity, we will roll it out to the Preah Vihear primaries in 2025, inviting Grade 6 students to compete at SLC. This also provides a great mentorship interaction for the older students to give a tour of the center where hopefully the younger students will be studying in Grade 7 and up.
Addressing Academic Gaps
Something that came up in interviews is that boys are more likely to drop out after falling behind academically because there’s more of a pull away from school and less of one into school. We’ve seen that offering Grade 6 remedial classes in Preah Vihear reduced the gender gap on our entrance exam to Srayang Learning Center for the 2024 school year, with more boys being able to enter secondary school as a result.
Library
The rate of books borrowed by students is one of the strongest indicators of engagement in school generally, with the chart showing just how low borrowing rates are across our enrolled male population. Ideally, we’d want all of our boys to be borrowing, which would close these gaps. While a lot of our current library initiatives have started to move that needle in supporting primary students, now we are focussing in on programs that will specifically engage older boys with the library.
- 2024 saw the opening of our 8th library at Chey Learning Center in rural Siem Reap which is focussed specifically on Grade 7 and up. Previous to this, older students were having to travel 20km to our Urban Learning Center in Siem Reap city to access titles that were specific to their ages and grades. Now there is a wealth of resources much closer to home for them to access. While it is early to tell how much boys are borrowing, we were heartened to see a good rate of boys coming to get their library cards.
- We’ve expanded tablet eReaders to 5 additional library locations, as we’ve seen how well boys responded to this technology at Knar Learning Center where they were first introduced.
- In early 2025, we also introduced Graded Readers & English Games to our libraries, intended to increase English fluency as well as engagement with library resources, particularly among boys. These are used in collaboration with English teachers, who bring their students once a week for an extended library session. Students get to engage in activities that encourage more free practice of the language and reinforce what’s being learned in the classroom. We think this is a wonderful opportunity to engage more boys with the benefits of visiting the library regularly to access the resources available there. Three months in, we are thrilled to see the progress this project has made on the boys borrowing metric!
- Monthly “reading days” that we’re building with elements of competition that encourage boys’ participation such as Spelling Bees, Top Reader awards, art and essay writing. And library events to showcase to students who are not yet enrolled in the library about its benefits. Librarians invite new students with their parents, where they hear from other PLF students about the benefit of reading and how it’s supported their studies and changed their lives.
Positive Male Role Models
Providing boys with positive role models is crucial in enabling them to envision the kind of man they want to become. Sadly in the communities where we work, they are often missing for many male students. In a recent parenting workshop that we held for families across our rural locations, one father shared: “I work a lot in the rice field, so when I come back home, I have no time to talk with my children because I am so tired. I eat dinner and then I go to sleep. Our relationship is not so good. After this workshop, I understand that it is important for me to be closer with my children, and to ask some questions about their study and their hobbies.”
In 2023, we were so excited to welcome Ravuth as a new teacher to Srayang Learning Center who, as PLF alumni hailing from Preah Vihear, perfectly embodies PLF’s mission. Ravuth was among the first students from Koh Ker primary school to forge the trail out of the villages and into higher education, moving first to what was then our dorm at Srayang to access middle school, and on to Siem Reap to attend high school and university, where he studied IT. While Ravuth was in university, he also taught part-time at our Knar Learning Center where he built out our science curriculum and led Knar to a school victory at our all-school chess tournament. We are thrilled that he has chosen to return to his homeland, bringing all this experience and inspiration to the younger generation.
In 2024, we also welcomed Samnang into our tertiary team full-time, bringing his social work and counsellor skills to our growing cohort of older students, as well as a male perspective to our workshops on subjects such as Growth & Change. Samnang is an excellent listener, tirelessly working to support students in their learning and self-development journeys, and one of the most compassionate hearts you could ever hope to meet.
Samnang also now leads the middle school section of our Mentorship program, which is growing in both reach and range. In 2024, we extended this program to nearly 800 students throughout the school year. This is an increase of 300 compared to 2022-23, with a stronger focus on mentorship for middle school students in our two rural locations at Chey and Knar Learning Center. We involved our University graduates in this, making sure we included plenty of male role models.
PLF Youth have also been involved heavily in mentorship. PLF Youth consists mainly of PLF high school students, mostly from our urban program. The members are some of our most talented and motivated students. They have spent this year coming up with topics suitable for our middle school students and have done an excellent job of mentoring and motivating our middle school student population.
Focusing Boys on the Future
Keeping boys engaged in school also involves focusing them on the future beyond. Our workshop program offers many life-skills topics that are missing from both the public school experience and the typical home environment in Cambodia. In 2024, we piloted a mini career prep workshop for middle school students to open their eyes to future possibilities and demonstrate that a lot of what they want in life needs at least a high school diploma. This workshop is intended as a lead-in to the Goal Setting topics that begin in Grade 10, which then discusses how to achieve those future goals.
Another large push has been opening up Vocational Training placements – for all students but with a specific focus on encouraging our boys to enroll in TVET programs. This is enabled by the opening of the National Polytechnic Institute of Angkor in recent years, offering courses such as electrical installation and automotive mechanic programs that usually appeal to males more than hospitality training alternatives.
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