Education in Cambodia was traditionally offered by the wats (Buddhist temples), thus providing education exclusively for the male population. The 1917 Law on Education passed by the French colonial government introduced a basic primary and secondary education system modelled loosely on that of France. However, that new system was fundamentally elitist, reaching only a very small per cent of the indigenous population and functioning mainly as a means of training civil servants for colonial service throughout French Indochina. After independence a universal education system was established, complemented by the development of a network of vocational colleges such as the School of Health (1953), the Royal School of Administration (1956), the College of Education (1959), the National School of Commerce (1958) and the National Institute of Judicial, Political and Economic Studies (1961). However, apart from a Buddhist University established in 1954 to provide education for monks, Cambodia had no public institution of higher education until 1960s when the Khmer Royal University was founded. In 1965 this institution became the Royal University and in the same year six more tertiary training institutions were created – the Royal Technical University, the Royal University of Fine Arts, the Royal University of Kompong Cham, the Royal University of Takeo, the Royal University of Agronomic Sciences and the Popular University. These were followed in 1968 by the Royal University of Battambang. As soon as they had come to power in 1975 the Khmer Rouge abolished education, systematically destroying teaching materials, textbooks and publishing houses. Schools and universities were closed and their buildings put to other uses. During this period large numbers of qualified teachers, researchers and technicians either fled the country or died. When the new Cambodian government came to power in 1979 it had to completely reconstruct the entire education system. Pre-school, primary and secondary schools were first to reappear, followed by non-formal education for adults and a network of colleges and universities.

Sustainable development is a pattern of resource use that aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for future generations. The term was used by the Brundtland Commission which coined what has become the most often-quoted definition of sustainable development as development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."[1][2]