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Poverty Reduction
Cambodia’s National Strategic Development Plan incorporates a comprehensive approach to the country development, which includes specific targets for poverty reduction and employment generation. This planning framework is aligned with the nine Cambodian Millennium Development Goals. To help the country achieve these goals, UNDP works to strengthen national capacities and maximize the country’s economic potential, strengthening trade, engaging with the private sector and improving aid effectiveness. UNDP supports the government to monitor and track progress toward MDGs at both national and subnational levels.
An important part of this work is supporting the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) to manage and target development aid more effectively. Another aspect is supporting efforts to use trade to drive employment and human development gains, especially in rural areas. Complementing this, policy research conducted by UNDP in areas such as extractive industries, economic competitiveness and human development aims to assist the government in generating and implementing innovative policy options that promote good economic governance.
In demining, UNDP contributes to poverty reduction and rural development by building the capacity of Government in the areas of monitoring, regulation, quality assurance, socio-economic planning, and post-clearance land use.
- Poverty has been reduced from 47 percent in 1993 to 30 percent in 2007. However, a third of Cambodians still live below the national poverty line (2,473 riel or US$0.61).
- Eighty percent of the population is rural. Of the total poor, 92 percent live in rural areas.
- The inequality levels have risen dramatically. The Gini Coefficient (which measures inequality – zero being perfect equality and 1 being absolute inequality) has moved upwards from 0.35 in 1994 to 0.40 in 2004 and 0.43 in 2007. As a recent trend, inequality has increased not only between rural and urban areas, but also within rural areas. Rural inequality rose from 0.27 in 1994 to 0.33 in 2004 and climbed again to 0.36 in 2007.
- Twelve percent of households, or 1.7 million individuals, were food insecure and most of these households were affected by increases in food prices.
- Cambodia is among the 36 countries with the highest burden of child under-nutrition and one of the 33 "alarming" countries for levels of hunger and under nutrition.














