Leadership and critical thinking lay the educational groundwork for a career path that extends across Southeast Asia
The story of Cambodia’s future may already be unfolding in a pair of secluded college dormitories in Phnom Penh’s Boeng Trabaek and Teuk Thla districts. Dozens of young women are intensifying their higher education through four years of residence in these urban leadership centres, learning skills beyond what they might absorb in university classrooms.
The Harpswell Foundation has made this possible since 2006, when American science and humanities professor Alan Lightman, in the wake of his first visit to Southeast Asia, co-founded the nonprofit organisation in support of college-age women. Today Harpswell is regarded as one of the premier women’s educational groups on the Asian continent.
“It changed my life in every possible way,” said Suon Raksmey, a graduate of the first class launched in 2010 and now the programme and dorm manager.
“My life after high school (in Kampong Thom) was designed by Harpswell.”
The number of women in leadership roles in Cambodia – political, economic, social – is a fraction of those held by their male counterparts. Indeed, out of 30 ministers in the new Hun Manet government, only three are women. But that is a reflection of the disparity in education: According to UNESCO statistics in 2021, only three in eight Cambodian women make it as far as upper secondary school.
Conversely, every one of the 75 women in the Harpswell programme attends and ultimately graduates from a university in Phnom Penh. Indeed, they presently take classes on 19 different campuses.
These young women began their journeys in Svay Rieng and Pursat, Kratie and Ratanakiri, in every province of Cambodia but Phnom Penh itself. After proving themselves in their secondary studies, they were tasked with convincing their parents – not many of whom had opportunities beyond primary education – to support them in committing to a full four-year residence at Harpswell.
For girls accepted to the programme, all lodging, food and medical care are provided free. But it’s never easy for a mother and father to send their daughter off to the big city for four years, exclusive of vacation breaks, or maybe longer. That’s especially true in a traditional Southeast Asian culture where family ties are tight.
During the application process, the girls must demonstrate academic excellence and proficiency in English, emotional intelligence and vision for the future, both for themselves personally and for the country of Cambodia, said Moul Samneang, Harpswell’s country director in Phnom Penh.
Once they are settled at a residence centre, they find themselves immersed in a rigorous in-house curriculum that provides intensive training in critical thinking, a subject not widely examined in more customary programmes.
Three or four times a week, students gather to research and analyse current national and world events in both English and Khmer. A high percentage of their studies are in the humanities, including international relations and law.
In addition to leadership training, they also have units in physical and emotional health and nutrition, analytical writing and debate, job skills and strategies for civic engagement. Significantly, in large part because of the Cambodian experience, Harpswell includes a “self-knowledge” unit in comparative genocide studies. “It helps them to understand their parents better,” said Samneang.
‘They’re going to need us’
The director was 11 when the Khmer Rouge evicted her family of 10 from their Phnom Penh home in 1975. Three of them survived the ensuing scourge until they could return 17 years later, under the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).
In the meantime, Samneang had become a teacher without a proper classroom. She persisted. “One day, they’re going to need us,” she recalls telling her brother, who now works for the UN in New York.
Today, the young Harpswell women of rural Cambodian roots indeed need Samneang and so many others, including their peers. Together, they take leadership roles within their scholastic communities, forming student governments and embracing responsibility for decisions made. They are guided by Harpswell staff and Leadership Residents, recruited from graduate programmes around the world to live, teach and mentor in the Harpswell dorms for periods of three to six months.
One Sunday each month, students gather for leadership seminars moderated by expert guest speakers. Among the guests are government officials, business executives, religious leaders, scientists, architects, professors and even journalists.
As of late 2023, Harpswell had graduated more than 230 students. These women have gone on to become leaders of their generation, advancing into such fields as law and medicine, engineering and finance. Most of them remain in Phnom Penh, where their impact and new confidence are more easily felt on a national level than in the provinces. Often these women extend their residence at Harpswell’s alumnae house for new graduates. The strong alumnae association provides a platform to continue the close bonds of support.
In more recent years, Harpswell is taking new steps to expand its footprint beyond Cambodia. Since 2017, the foundation has hosted the Harpswell ASEAN Summit for Women’s Leadership in Penang, Malaysia – a two-week summer intensive for 22 young professional women from Cambodia, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal.
“It’s smaller in scale (than in Cambodia), but it potentially has a much bigger impact because it nurtures young women from every country of Southeast Asia,” Alan Lightman said in a Zoom call from his Boston home. “They’re a little bit older, 25 to 30. We give them grants to do social entrepreneurship in their own countries. A number of them have started projects using the critical thinking and leadership that they’ve learned with our programme.”
‘Helping the entire country’
One of the founder’s most profound memories from his 2003 visit to Cambodia was a visit to a village in Kampong Chhnang. “The people there believed in the power of education, even though they had nothing,” Lightman recalled. “They came up to me, the women holding their babies, and said, ‘Would you build us a school?’”
“Knowing the story of the genocide in Cambodia, and the fact that these people were subsistence farmers and had nothing but the clothes on their backs, I was terribly impressed. I came back to the US and raised the money to build a school in that village.”
Another life-changing encounter came with lawyer Veasna Chea. “She told me that when she went to law school in the 1990s, there was no lodging for female students, so she had to live underneath the building for four years.”
“That really inspired me,” said Lightman. “She and I came up with the idea to build a dormitory for women attending university. It was the only dormitory in the country for female students.”
Being able to attract Cambodia’s brightest young women “was a valuable resource, like finding oil in your backyard,” Lightman said.
“And I thought, I can do more than just give them free room and board. I can give them a programme in critical thinking and leadership skills, and thereby get a big leverage effect because each one of them can go out and do good things in the country. Then I’m helping not only these 36 young women, I’m helping the entire country.”
Lightman is now the writer and host of a three-part mini-series on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) titled “Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science.” He described it as a cutting-edge contemplation “of the philosophical, theological and moral issues that are raised by modern science.”
