Youth Leadership Challenge

Source: International Republican Institute

In 2006, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the Youth Council of Cambodia (YCC) developed and produced the Youth Leadership Challenge (YLC), an innovative reality television show that combines entertainment with valuable learning opportunities for the youth of Cambodia. Contestants – ages 18 to30 – have been recognized as future civil society and political leaders, and have demonstrated a sincere desire to participate in the future of their country.

Now in its fourth season, the show engages Cambodians age 30 and younger – who currently represent 70 percent of the population – through television entertainment, the most popular medium in the country. Prior to each season 16 participants – eight young men and eight young women – are chosen for the competition. Applicants are chosen based on their leadership skills, confidence and knowledge of democratic principles.

In each episode participants are randomly divided into two teams that compete in civil society-themed challenge. The challenges provide an opportunity for contestants to participate in leadership activities, such as fundraising for orphanages, collecting signatures for a petition drive and public speaking. The contestants also showcase different civic society building activities and community activism that encourages those who follow the show to participate in their communities.

Prior to each challenge, contestants receive training from experts on the skills they will need to complete. For example, to prepare for the mock court episode young Cambodian lawyers and judges coached the teams on court procedures and how to build and research a court case; for an episode where each team created a television commercial encouraging Cambodians to vote a television producer trained the contestants on how to create effective television commercials.

At the end of each show, the two teams are judged by the United Nations Development Fund for Women’s Goodwill Ambassador Chea Samnang, and the Center for Social Development Executive Director Theary C. Seng on their planning, implementation and performance of the task. The losing team then selects two members that they think should leave their team and the two are then asked to “go home,” as the show’s catch-phrase goes.

Between episodes, contestants chose a volunteer activity that gives back to the community. Activities have included: purchasing computers for an impoverished school in a rural area, books for elementary schools and orphanages, toys for children at the Phnom Penh school for the deaf and blind, and a monetary donation to a local nongovernmental organization that provides vocational training to homeless children. During season two’s final episode all of the season’s contestants come together to donate sponsorship money and toys to a Cambodian orphanage. In one of the episodes in season four contestants cooked dinner for a local orphanage where the show took place. Due to the popularity of the show many local businesses donate financial resources for these activities.

In the final episode of each season the two final contestants compete in a final challenge live on air and the Cambodian public votes on the winner using SMS technology.

Soksan Hing was YLC’s first winner and paved the way for the leadership development training in Washington, DC. Soksan has pledged most of his life to educating youth on human rights and anti-corruption, using different activities to encourage youth to participate in his forums including sporting activities. Since the show Soksan has taken leadership positions in different local nongovernmental organizations and worked to help energize youth to participate in Cambodia’s 2008 parliamentary elections.

Norin Tauch survived eight rounds of competition and succeeded in beating out 15 candidates to win the title of “best youth” for season two. Norin earned a degree in law from the Royal University of Law and Economics and is working as an Assistant Operations Executive for Casino Lava Management.

Lalune Sreang became the first female to win YLC, during the final competition of season three. She received more than 3,000 text message votes from television viewers. Lalune is pursuing a degree in environmental studies at the Royal University of Phnom Penh. Upon winning she said, “I think it is a very good program that provides a great opportunity for young Cambodian people to exhibit their talents and abilities. I now feel more confident in making decisions and facing challenges. Also, I learned how to improve my weaknesses and have the courage to face difficulties.”

Each season’s winner receives a two week trip to the United States to develop leadership skills. The trip exposes the winner to leadership development, message development, public opinion polling, international media, youth organizations, fundraising, international organizations, the American political system, technology, and business development. Winners have met with local, state, and federal elected officials, campaign organizations, media representatives, Youth Service America, Youth for Tomorrow, the United States Agency for International Development, the U.S. State Department, National Endowment for Democracy, National Democratic Institute, and the Hudson Institute.

The Youth Leadership Challenge has steadily grown in popularity and is now aired during prime time on Cambodia’s most popular television station, the Cambodian Television Network, with highlights broadcast on a weekly news program and replays of the show are in syndication. In addition, millions of television viewers have learned about civil society, community service and democratic concepts through the show.

Group Works to Improve Literacy

Students' activities were happy with reading and playing puzzle in new library opened by Young Generation for Development

By Nuch Sarita, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
14 November 2007
Please click here to listen Nuch Sarita reports in Khmer

A new group has started up a rural literacy program it hopes will help alleviate poverty in Cambodia.

The group, Young Generation for Development, has 16 members and will undertake a three-month project in Kampong Cham province, funded by the US Embassy in Phnom Penh and the International Republican Institute.

Director Hing Soksan said in an interview with VOA Khmer that the reading would help children improve critical thinking, cleverness, broad knowledge and dignity.

The children will be role models for their community and Cambodian society, Hing Soksan said.

"The Young Generation for Development wishes all students' parents or guardians to be a part of the students' learning, so that they can encourage their children to like and love reading and learn to avoid illiteracy," Hing Soksan said.

The group's project coordinator Heng Socheata called on all parents to send their children to school.

"We want to promote the awareness of the importance of reading among children and their parents and to make children's parents aware of their role in pushing their children to read as much as possible," she said.

Student Democracy Advocate Visits US

Mr. Hing Soksan was interviewed in VOA studio during the trip to USA

Nuch Sarita, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
27 September 2007
Please click here to listen Nuch Sarita reports in Khmer

Hing Soksan, an officer of the Students' Movement for Democracy, began a two-week visit to Washington last week, where he met US government leaders and attended leadership development training.

Hing Soksan was sponsored on his trip by the International Republican Institute, a US-based group that promotes democracy abroad.

He met with Anthony O'Donnell, a Maryland state legislator, as well as members of pro-democracy groups and State Department officials.

American youths are strong and independent and willing to take the government and their president to task, Hing Soksan said. This is different from the youth in Cambodia, who depend on the government, he said.

"Young adults in the US like to develop their independence, confidence and responsibilities," he said. "They have the courage to speak out on their views and directly identify problems. Young American adults especially have creative ideas where they continue to improve and refine on them. They make themselves valuable."

US youths are more able to attract political attention on issues, he said, whereas Cambodians seek out politicians for favors.

The Khmer Rouge tribunal was necessary in Cambodia, he said, where the youth remain under-educated over the regime and its policies.

The Apprentice Goes to Civics Class

Judges and contestants gather in the boardroom to decide who will be"going home" at the end of each episode of Youth Leadership Challenge. More picture slideshow...

A reality TV show brings U.S.-style democracy to Cambodia.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007
By Suzy Khimm
The Slate Magazine

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia—With her button-down blouse, plastic-frame glasses, and impeccable résumé—youth delegate to the United Nations, research assistant on rural economic development—Heng Socheata seems like an unlikely maverick.

"I didn't tell my friends to watch the show," the 21-year-old accounting student said. "If I won, it'd be OK. But if I failed, it'd be kind of embarrassing."

Socheata is among the young stars of a new reality TV show that quietly subverted the political orthodoxy of Cambodia's heavily censored broadcast networks—seven public and private stations all under the thumb of the ruling party. Part Apprentice spinoff and part civics class, the Youth Leadership Challenge replaces Donald Trump's aspiring moguls with 16 citizen-heroes who race around the capital collecting signatures for a neighborhood clean-up petition, producing a social-advocacy video, and soliciting donations for an orphanage.

In the show's inaugural season, which concluded last week, contestants were quick to adopt the true spirit of the genre: Reduced to tears one moment, they gave on-air confessionals the next. There have, for sure, been a few cross-cultural adjustments. Trump's trademark "You're fired!" was deemed too harsh for the Cambodians, two of whom were instead told to "Go home" each week. The prize for the last do-gooder standing was a trip to America, still the promised land for Cambodia's young and ambitious.

The program was the brainchild of the International Republican Institute, a USAID-funded and U.S. Republican Party-linked group that collaborated with the Youth Council of Cambodia to produce the show. IRI, along with its sister organization, the National Democratic Institute, was founded during the Reagan administration to aid U.S. efforts to promote—in some critics' parlance, "export"—democracy abroad, with offices now in Iraq, Haiti, and more than 40 other geo-strategic hot spots. Both groups still recall the spirit of the Cold War years, focusing on political-party development, civic mobilization, and election monitoring to promote "the nuts and bolts of democracy," according to Jerome Cheung, NDI's resident country director in Cambodia.

Of course, that the United States once bombed Cambodia in the name of such ideals isn't lost on this new wave of political missionaries. But Cambodia, unlike Vietnam, was forced to recover from Year Zero and the mass murder of nearly 2 million citizens. By 1992, when the U.N. occupation began, many Cambodians were ready to let in the phalanx of Western donors and aid groups at its door and begin the country's fitful transition to democracy.

Under the guise of its competitive theatrics, the Youth Leadership Challenge makes an indirect but unmistakable challenge to a government that continues to censor broadcasts of unfavorable news items, miniskirted entertainers, and portions of congressional hearings that seem threatening to the ruling party. In one high-profile crackdown, the IRI-backed Cambodian Center for Human Rights hosted a public forum that led to the arrest of CCHR director Kem Sokha and four colleagues on charges of defaming Prime Minister Hun Sen in late 2005, provoking an international outcry.

Barely a year later, the Youth Leadership Challenge featured a free-flowing debate about the national law prohibiting adultery, a bill mandating military conscription, and sex education in public schools. Between the frenzied yelps of the timekeeper, the contestants expounded, rebutted, and, occasionally, grabbed the microphone away from one another. "I don't know how we're supposed to argue against what we believe in," Socheata admitted in a fit of offstage nerves, moments before making the case for why women shouldn't be allowed to hold high political office.

According to local media trainer Moeun Chhean Nariddh, the program's unscripted antics have helped usher in "one of the most serious and political programs in Cambodia. … All networks are either censored or self-censored, as everything is controlled by or affiliated with the ruling party."

Local observers are still wondering how the kids have gotten away with it. For years, IRI had been commonly perceived as supporting the opposition Sam Rainsy Party—an allegation bolstered in 1997 when an IRI staffer was wounded in a grenade attack on an opposition rally he was attending, as well as by Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell's long-standing calls for "regime change" in Cambodia. (Cynthia Bunton, IRI's Asia director, maintains that the organization has always been nonpartisan.)

Over the years, however, the ruling Cambodian People's Party has only continued to consolidate power, bolstered by Hun Sen's strong-arm tactics and an expanding grass-roots base. Many believe the SRP has lost its critical bark since its eponymous leader's return from self-imposed exile in France last year. The CPP accepted IRI's offer of political training for the first time in its history last fall, and IRI has been able to explore alternative means of cultivating a more open society in Cambodia.

"You have a hole in the boat, and water is coming through that hole," explained Thun Saray, director of Adhoc, a leading rights organization. "You have to plug the hole without making the boat turn over."

Certainly, the reality show's contestants hardly come off as radicals; they're the good kids, overachievers chosen from nearly 200 candidates. But the program has capitalized on their youth and ambition by leaning on another infamous U.S. export: American cultural mystique.

In a country where 70 percent of the population is under 30, Cambodians have an overwhelmingly positive opinion of the United States, as IRI's own 2004 poll confirmed. Bunton emphasized that the show's organizers "tried to tweak [the program] to be relevant to Cambodians." But the competition's big prize is hardly an afterthought. "That's why everyone wanted to be on the show—to go to the U.S.," said contestant Sorn Sarath, 24, who had already posted a photo of the U.S. ambassador on the wall of his volunteer-staffed NGO, the Student Movement for Democracy. The first Youth Leadership Challenge winner, Hing Soksan, 26, is another SMD staffer who introduced himself in an interview as an orphan and a future NGO officer. Unable to find a suitable job in Cambodia, Soksan hopes to use his trip to the United States "to learn from American leaders … and make Cambodia have more freedom than it has now."

At the same time, the contestants are hardly guileless consumers of everything Amerik. For them, the show's most outrageous task wasn't canvassing pool halls or handing out condoms on Valentine's Day, it was being criticized on camera. In a culture where "losing face" remains cause for shame, the judges dissected the contestants' leadership flaws—then had them turn on one another.

"In Cambodian culture, we don't say these things directly. We have to save face," said Socheata. "I've learned how to go after people directly. You have to be very good at seeing the weak points of other people, and you have to go back after them."

For one of the judges, that unrestrained public criticism lies at the heart of the show's edifying mission. "It's part of American culture—the competition of ideas," said Theary Seng, the Cambodian-American director of the Center for Social Development. "In a market economy, everything goes through a refining process, and the best idea or product will surface."

Trump couldn't have said it better himself.

CHAMPION OF YOUTH LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE

Youth Leadership Challenge (YLC) was an educational program to promote leadership among young people, and the TV show was produced to encourage youth audience to become more responsible, act responsibly, generate initiatives, and involve in and improve their community service through working with local authority. More detail please read in Khmer and English [1] [2] [3].

YLC was co-organized by Youth Council of Cambodia and TV5 and supported fund by United States Agency for International Development via International Republican Institute. On March 03, 2007 was the date of episode of YLC competition, HING Soksan was only one candidate who won the prize at the end of the YLC and was interviewed by local and international medias, one of them The Slate, famous magazine of USA, published as well. The prize for YLC champion (first-place winner) was an oversea study visit for two weeks to the United States in order to get leadership development training and short internship.