GBV service provider training

The context

Cambodia's gender-based violence service providers, state and non-state, are spread across the whole country, and their training had always happened in person. When COVID hit, that stopped working. With the ACCESS program (a five-year DFAT-funded initiative, 2018 to 2023) and the Ministry of Women's Affairs, we set out to move that training online without losing what made it useful.

Building it with the ministry

We reviewed the existing training materials, proposed three platform options, and settled on Moodle as the one MoWA could actually afford to run and scale. From there we customized it for the way their network works: roles and permissions for administrators, teachers and students, course categories so the ministry could organize modules for different groups, and registration by OTP so access stayed controlled.

The content was the real work. With MoWA and ACCESS we turned the legal protection guidelines, and the guidance on the limited use of mediation in GBV cases, into self-paced modules in Khmer, with quizzes, assignments and forums so providers could learn from each other and not just from the screen.

Handing over the keys

The part of this project I care most about is the ending. We trained MoWA's team to manage the platform and its content themselves, so updating a module doesn't require a foreign consultant or a new project budget. Service providers anywhere in Cambodia can now work through standardized training at their own pace, and the ministry owns the system that delivers it.

A training platform for GBV response is only as good as the institution running it. This one runs without us.