Minister of Education, Youth and Sport Hang Chuon Naron accepted the 2023 World Literacy Award presented by the Word Literacy Foundation in recognition of the government’s policies and programmes promoting literacy in Cambodia.

There are five categories for the annual awards, with a different winner chosen for each. Chuon Naron accepted the award given to governments or state institutions that enacted the most effective policies or undertook the biggest reforms and improvements to encourage literacy and reading.

The World Literacy Award 2023 was won by Cambodia for its efforts at reforming the education system to meet the challenges of the 21st century, which includes robust literacy initiatives, said the ministry in a social media post.

It said Chuon Naron accepted the award on behalf of the government in the “Contribution to Literacy by a Government” category.

The other recipients were awarded for “Contribution to Literacy by an Organisation”, “Contribution to Literacy by a Youth”, “Contribution to Literacy by an Individual”, and the “Academic Research Recognition Award”.

Chuon Naron led a delegation to attend the World Literacy Summit held on April 2-4 at Oxford University in the UK.

“This recognition and award reflect positive effects of implementing the educational reform programme. The education ministry had laid out the programme to enhance the quality of education by training teachers to implement reading packages and mathematics for the first classes,” said the post.

The ministry also noted that educational transformation is a vital need to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) for Cambodia. The digital transformation will also lead to the adoption of digital government, a working population with digital skills living in a digital society, smart cities, Industry 4.0, digital businesses and further innovations in financial technology or FinTech such as the mobile payment platforms that are already ubiquitous in the Kingdom.