National Intern – Policy and Public Finance for Children, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential. 

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone. 

And we never give up. 

For every child, resilience

UNICEF started operation in Cambodia in 1952 and opened first country office in 1973 in Phnom Penh. More information on what we do in Cambodia is available at https://www.unicef.org/cambodia/.

How can you make a difference? 

In 2004, the Royal Government of Cambodia officially launched the Public Financial Management Reform Programme. The reform, led by Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF), adopted platform or phase approach having each platform building upon the other and they are inter-connected. The four phases of reform are: (1) building budget credibility, (2) improved financial accountability, (3) improved budget-policy linkages, and (4) improved performance accountability. The first phase was launched in 2004 and the second phase was launched in 2008. The reform is now at stage or phase 4, strengthening performance accountability from 2023-2027. The budget system reform strategy 2018-2025 which is one of the backbones in support of the phase 4 reform and has been updated to 2025-2028 aims to strengthen implementation of performance informed budgeting (PB). This budget system reform was initially piloted as part of line ministry budget since 2007 and was rolled out to all line ministries starting from ten key ministries in 2015 to thirty-eight line ministries/agencies in 2018.

UNICEF has been actively supporting rolling out the programme budget formulation and execution and capacity building of the social ministries since 2014. More than ten ministries benefited from UNICEF support. The technical support provided targeted toward empowering and improving budget allocation and execution of the programme and interventions addressing children needs. Having programme budget in place allowed UNICEF to clearly identify gaps and define interventions aimed at addressing multidimensional child poverty. Public finance analysis tools including budget analysis rely on availability of budget data. UNICEF has been utilizing this budget data to conduct budget analysis and lately conducted first child rights budget analysis to inform policy-budget discussion and enforce implementation of the recommendations of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. So far, Ministry of Economy and Finance published significant quantity of budget documents in PDF in the website; however, there is a need to do data entry of these budget law and relevant documents into excel based budget database to be used for budget analysis and monitor...