In the early 1990s, Cambodia was beginning to open up after ten years of Vietnamese occupation. One effect of this was that what had been the source of school textbooks, the Vietnamese government, dried up. In 1992, UNICEF and several smaller donors stepped in to help the Ministry of Education (MOE) increase its own production capacity. But first the MOE needed to know how many textbooks the schools had.
There were records of how many books had been dispatched to the provinces and districts but little was known on how many were actually in the schools since large quantities had been diverted to local markets. It was imperative for school principals to be actively involved as the last link in the supply chain. The national policy was to return, repair, and reuse the textbooks, but there was no data at the school level indicating how many books were returned and how many were reusable.
In 1993, UNICEF developed a prototype Returned Book Record (RBR) system and tested it in Kompong Speu District. For the first time, schools were able to provide the central Ministry authorities with facts only they knew:
How many books were received?
How many books were returned?
How many books were reusable?
How many students did they expect in the new school year?
Without computers, phones, mobiles, or Internet, data collection at that time relied on principals completing a hard copy RBR supplied by the Ministry. Computers were only available in Phnom Penh, but the data was entered onto a simple Excel spreadsheet with satisfactory results. The RBR was expanded to the remaining seven districts. To this day, the Ministry uses a data collection system based on this early RBR. Textbooks are provided based on a two-year projection by the principals; textbooks requested in May 2019 would be supplied in September 2020.
Paul Gibbings the leader of the RBR/TRIMS project envisioned the use of current technologies to update this process. The Returned Book Record/Textbook Management Information System (RBR/TRIMS) app allows representatives of schools with mobile phones and Internet access to enter data about their textbook requirements for the upcoming school year. This provides government ministries and NGOs with the ability to more effectively supply the correct number of textbooks, on time, to the schools that need them.
As Cambodia and other MOEs around the world adopt use of this app, more students should have access to textbooks they can use.