Cambodia (Winter 2009)

Decades after the Vietnam war and the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia remains a impoverished nation unable to climb out of the devastation of its war torn past.

In 2009, The Project Fund will once again visit Cambodia to evaluate projects where we can make a difference in the daily lives of some of the poorest people of this country.

The following are some statistics on Cambodia:

35% of Cambodians live below the national poverty line (the poverty line deemed appropriate for a country by its authorities) of $0.45 per day. Rural households account for nearly 90% of the country's poor.

Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia, has 564 slum areas housing 300,000 people, one quarter of the city's population. Ten years ago 30,000 people lived in 187 slum areas.

36% of children under 5 years of age are moderately or severely under weight and 37% are under height for their age. The infant mortality rate for the five years ending in 2005 was 65 per 1,000 live births and the under-5 mortality rate was 83 per 1,000 live births.

There were 898 land-mine injuries or fatalities in Cambodia in 2004.

1.2% of Cambodians are blind. Cambodia has three eye surgeons. There are 374 qualified dentists in Cambodia, one for every 30,000 people.  A six-year-old child has an average of 9.7 teeth that are decayed, missing or filled.

In Cambodia there are 26 psychiatrists, 40 psychiatric nurses and 165 doctors who have training in basic and primary mental health care. 70,000 people are infected with tuberculosis each year in Cambodia; in 2004 TB killed 107 people for every 100,000 Cambodians.

Acute malnutrition in poor urban children increased to 15.9% in 2008 from 9.6% in 2005.

In 2001 33% of pupils continued in school as far as grade 9. By 2005 this had fallen to an estimated 29.3%.

11% of children have access to early education services.  About 8,000 students graduate each year from Cambodia's 47 colleges and universities. The National Library of Cambodia contains about 100,000 books, of which 20,000 are books that survived the Khmer Rouge regime.

Around two million children aged between five and 17 (about half of all children in that age range) are involved in work. 1.5 million of these are aged 14 and under. More than two-thirds of working children are employed in agricultural activities, including fishing and work on rubber plantations.

The labor pool will increase from an estimated 5.6 million people in 2001 to almost 10 million by 2011. To provide employment to new entrants to the labor pool, Cambodia's economy would need to expand by 10% annually, double the growth rate of recent years.  About 300,000 people are added to Cambodia's labor force each year, but the country's economic growth generates only between 20,000 and 30,000 new jobs each year.