Cambodia's Research Center on AI in Education — Turning a National AI-Readiness Assessment into Teacher Policy

Cambodia completed an AI Ethics Readiness Assessment (RAM) in July 2025 with UNESCO's support, applying UNESCO's 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. The RAM concluded that education needed "immediate and coordinated efforts to ensure the ethical, proportionate, and human-centred use of AI," and it became the evidence base for a national AI strategy that is now in draft.

On 24 November 2025, Cambodia's first National AI for Education Conference — convened by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MoEYS) with UNESCO, and attended by more than 400 policymakers, educators, researchers and development partners — inaugurated the Research Center on AI for Education (RAIE), hosted at the Cambodia Academy of Digital Technology (CADT) with support from the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications. An ICT and AI Competency Framework for teachers is being developed under the Strengthening Teacher Education Programmes in Cambodia (STEPCam) initiative, funded by the Global Partnership for Education at USD 27.02 million.

This is an institution- and policy-building practice, not yet a classroom intervention with measured learning results — no teacher-training completion numbers or student outcomes have been published. The RAM itself is also a candid diagnostic of constraints: at the time of the assessment, only 22% of Cambodian schools reported functional computers, national internet access averaged 55.6%, roughly 80% of teachers held qualifications below bachelor's degree level, and available AI tools remain overwhelmingly English-language in a country where Khmer is underrepresented in AI training data — risks the new framework is explicitly meant to address rather than ones already solved.

Read the full analysis: https://tdso.ngo/artificial-intelligence-in-cambodian-education-a-warning-against-misplaced-hope/