United World Schools (UWS) is an international charity focused on providing sustainable and quality education in the world’s most remote and marginalized communities by providing access to education for the first time.
Our mission is to improve, through education, life opportunities for children living in remote and marginalized communities in Cambodia, Madagascar, Myanmar and Nepal. Since 2008, we have worked with over 275 communities to provide over 50,000 out-of-school children with access to free primary education.
We have developed a model of education provision that is low-cost, sustainable, inclusive, and scalable. Our in-country operations are led by a team of locally employed education and development experts, through whom we have developed close relationships with the national government and engaged with community stakeholders to foster shared accountability.
We opened our first school in the Kong Nork community of Cambodia’s Ratanakiri Province in 2008 and have since established ourselves as one of the leading education NGOs in rural areas of the country. Since our establishment, we have established 136 schools in Cambodia with a historic reach of over 30,600 students across seven different provinces – Ratanakiri, Mondulkiri, Kratie, Koh Kong, Oddar Meanchey, Preah Vihear and Steung Treng.
Sustainability is a central tenet of the UWS model. We have agreements in place with the government of Cambodia for the long-term transition of our schools into the national education system. This approach, which takes place over a five- to seven-year period, ensures the sustainability and long-term funding of all schools. Twenty UWS schools across Cambodia have successfully transitioned into the national education system.
Currently, there are 13,100 students enrolled across 116 UWS schools. Students are educated by a team of 112 teachers and teaching assistants employed and trained from within their own communities as well as a further 510 teachers supplied through our partnership with the government.
UWS increases the reach and the capacity of the national sector capacity and positively influences the quality of provision, through our partnership approach with the government and through the influence of our policies, practice and training. The success of our model is frequently recognized, for example, in 2021 UWS received the King’s Award, Khmer Moni Sarapoin Mohaserey Wat, for UWS’ education and literacy programmes in Cambodia. We are scaling up quickly, with a growing reputation as effective, sustainable operators and pioneers in the development education sector.
