About OIC Australia.
Our Vision
Every child can exercise their right to communication.
Mission
To provide access to speech therapy services in Cambodia (as well as other countries, where needed) by:
Raising awareness of the importance of speech therapy services for children’s education.
Assisting to building a speech therapy industry and ecosystem, including university courses, training speech therapy professionals, speech clinics, with the assistance of government and private sector support in Cambodia (and other countries where needed)
Raising funds to support this mission
Our Organisation
OIC Australia was established in 2019 to support the work of OIC Cambodia, which was created in 2013 by Weh Yeoh with the goal build a self-sustainable speech therapy industry and ecosystem in Cambodia by 2030.
Hundreds of thousands of children in Cambodia have speech and/or swallowing difficulties, yet there is not one Cambodian trained speech therapist in Cambodia. OIC Australia believes that every child deserves the basic human right to communicate and being able to communicate is an essential part of a child’s education.
OIC Cambodia’s current objective to create a Cambodian university course for speech therapy professionals and to influence Government policy, so that 100 Cambodian university-trained speech therapists may be developed and integrated into the Cambodian public sector by 2030. This will provide the speech therapy services much needed by children in Cambodia with speech and swallowing difficulties and create jobs for the speech therapy industry, in universities, the government sector and the private sector.
OIC Australia was initially established to provide strategic support and financial support to OIC Cambodia, by raising awareness of the need for speech therapy services in Cambodia for Cambodian children. We support by raising funds and assisting to find strategic partners for OIC Cambodia’s mission.
OIC Australia’s mission is now broader to seek to provide this same support, where needed, in other countries.
About OIC Cambodia
OIC Cambodia is led by a Cambodian management committee, including Chenda Net, the executive director and Ruth Bryce, an Australian speech therapist and university strategy director.
In March 2019, OIC Cambodia signed a memorandum of agreement with the Cambodian Government’s Ministry of Education, Youths and Sport to implement the project of developing speech therapy services supporting in the education sector in Cambodia working across 5 provinces, Phnom Penh, Kandal, Kampong Cham, Battambang and Siem Reap from 2019 to 2024. You can lean more details about this agreement here.
OIC Cambodia has partnered with the social enterprise speech therapy clinic, Happy Kids Clinic in Phnom Penh, which is the only speech therapy clinic in Cambodia where foreign trained speech therapists currently provide speech therapy services to private clients, schools and group client sessions.
Learn more
Watch OIC Australia and Cambodia’s Founder and Director Weh Yeoh’s TEDx Talk on ‘Why International Charities Need To Make Themselves Redundant’ below. To learn more about OIC Australia’s ‘exit strategy’ to create a sustainable and self-sufficient Speech Pathology course and profession in Cambodia.
