This Guide is currently under construction. We are continuing to update it as we sort through our notes…

Introduction to this Guide:

Here we’ve created a textual runbook / tutorial / whitepaper intended as a roadmap for those who wish to build a school in rural Cambodia, discussing the process and procedures we followed, end-to-end, for this project. From research and discovery to creating realistic timelines and mitigating risks — we try to cover it here at a high-level, linking to more specific resources as we go.

We hope that this will be helpful to team attempting a similar effort in Cambodia and even elsewhere. However, this guide will be heavily focused on Cambodia and based on our experiences school-building therein.

Project Phases:

Determine the project phases.

While we know what we want to do, we need to decompose this effort into high-level phases.

The phases we used are:

  • Geographical Target Research Phase
  • Asset Location Phase
  • Fundraising Phase
  • NGO Interaction Phase
  • Follow-up and Data Analysis Phase
  • Site Inspection Phase
  • Decision Phase
  • NGO Partner Acceptance & Agreement Phase
  • Milestone Funding Loop Phase
    • Money Transfer (Round 1st..nth milestone)
    • Verify Work (Round 1st..nth milestone)
  • Opening Ceremony Phase
  • Ongoing Maintenance Phase

Phase: Geographical Target Research

  1. Research international and national data and decide on a country (or a few — we decided to target Cambodia, as our team has roots in the area, and it was the original idea anyway.
  2. ….

Phase: Asset Location

  1. (Knowledgeable parties)
  2. …

Phase: Fundraising

  1. Helps to have an associate or two, who share your goals of school-building. A well-built facility end-to-end seem to cost anywhere between $50k and $100k, and the primary school which we ended up building cost over $70k.
  2. …

Phase: NGO Interaction

  1. (Initial contact, reference, verification, and background checks)
  2. …

Phase: Follow-up and Data Analysis

  1. (list pros and cons)
  2. …

Phase: Site Inspection

  1. (satellite, independent party)
  2. …

Phase: Decision Phase

  1. (sleep on it, consider all approaches and options)
  2. …

Phase: NGO Partner Acceptance & Agreement

  1. (tell the chosen school builder 501c3 that we’ve decided to partner with them)
  2. …

Phase: Milestone Funding Loop

  1. (money transfer, milestone verification)
  2. …

Phase: Opening Ceremony

  1. (travel, planning)
  2. …

Phase: Ongoing Maintenance

  1. (facility enhancements, periodic needs analyses)
  2. …

Cambodia / School-Building Resources & Links

Cambodia National Curriculum: https://www.ukessays.com/essays/education/the-cambodian-national-curriculum-for-primary-schools-education-essay.php