This project will fund the educational and living expenses of 20 students from 7 provinces starting their 1 year hospitality training programme at EGBOK in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Hospitality offers a wealth of rewarding and self-sustaining careers in Cambodia, it also builds confidence, leadership, and a spirit of service. The traits students develop; compassion, kindness, selflessness, reach across the world and beyond cultural barriers, acting as a universal language that everyone understands.
Cambodia has made significant strides in its economic growth in recent years but critical challenges remains in its youth & adolescent populace, the largest in Southeast Asia. High school dropout rates, family economic pressures, lure of informal employment, etc, have contributed to structural educational issues, resulting in a widely documented skills deficit in the labour market. Consequently, this has also pushed youths towards illegal migrant labour and human trafficking situations.
By reaching out to under-served young adults, EGBOK equips Cambodian youths with tangible employable skills that helps them and their families to break the poverty cycle and become self-supporting young individuals. Besides industry hospitality skills, the project also provides training in a real world working environment in our training restaurant, life skills training, mentoring, and career support in a supportive environment, staffed by a dedicated team of local teachers and social workers.
With a 5 to 7 percent tourism growth in 2016 and the targeted creation of over 1 million direct jobs by 2020, our programme model directly capitalises on the Cambodia's steep tourism growth and national tourism strategy, and at the same time resonates with the country's youth development priorities and UNWTO's 2017 call to use tourism as a force for good. We have since graduated 7 classes (total of 246 alumni), with 100% of 2016 alumni securing employment after graduation.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
