Author name: Mark Desmaele

Cambodia’s education sector is placing growing institutional confidence in artificial intelligence as a response to longstanding gaps in teaching quality, infrastructure, and equity. This essay argues that confidence is misplaced. Across MoEYS programmes such as Live Teaching 2026, the Primary Learning Platform, and Sala Digital, and among development partners including UNESCO/STEPCam, the same structural logic repeats: AI and digital tools are deployed as compensatory mechanisms ahead of the conditions that would make them effective. The result is not improvement but the reproduction of existing inequalities at a higher level of technological complexity. Drawing on cognitive science, bilingual education research, and Cambodian educational scholarship, the essay identifies three structural harms: AI widens the access gap it claims to close, introduces cultural and economic bias through Western-centric training data, and erodes the foundational knowledge and critical capacity that genuine learning requires. The argument concludes that the priority must be teacher development, a Cambodian core knowledge curriculum, genuine bilingual education infrastructure, and honest investment in physical school conditions, not AI platforms that assume into existence the very conditions they cannot provide.

The dominant model of grant funding channels resources through projects designed to advance donors’ priorities rather than the core programmes and institutional needs of the organisations and public bodies receiving support. Across the education sector, this approach fragments local capacity, sidelines ministries and teacher training institutions, and produces outcomes that are difficult to sustain. Donors have a legitimate role in setting standards for how funded work is conducted, requiring inclusion, environmental responsibility, financial transparency, and a focus on real outcomes rather than administrative outputs. What they should not do is determine what the work is. TDSO calls on donors and funding bodies to draw a clear distinction between the floor they set and the ceiling they must not impose, and to shift towards funding arrangements that actively support coordination, strengthen national systems, and place substantive programme decisions in the hands of those closest to the learners they are meant to serve.