Cambodia’s telecommunication ministry has called for applicants to this year’s Women in Tech award.
The award is granted each year to women who excelled in the development of the IT sector.
Five awards will be presented this year compared with three last year: for entrepreneurship, engineering, community development, digital multimedia, and innovation.
Yim Hout Healy, an award coordinator, said the ministry turned down many potential applicants last year during the pilot program due to “shortages” in the award categories.
The overly competitive process put off candidates last year, Hout Healy added, which led the ministry to create more awards this time around.
"Students can also participate in this 2019 Tech Award providing that they know which category they fit in [even] if they are college students, bloggers, or YouTubers, who create content on Facebook or on any other social media platforms," she said.
Kan Channmeta, a secretary of state at the ministry, said the awards were intended to recognize the “crucial roles” women play in national economic and technological progress.
“Furthermore, this program highlights the mobilization of all players in Cambodia to achieve the goal of digital change and other strategic goals set out in the 2020 Telecommunications and Information Technology Development Policy. We encourage more women to participate in this initiative," he said in a statement.
Srun Sovan, the founding CEO of the education technology company Edemy, said that she hoped the award would be a breakthrough for women in the technology sector.
“If we have the program that reflects women's achievement, this can help encourage other women and enable them to see more of what they can do nowadays. Sometimes, women have no model to see and thus they don't know how far they could go,” she said.
