Sophea lives in a small village in rural Cambodia. Her house sits back from the road, surrounded by the everyday rhythms of village life—cooking, farming, children moving between houses, neighbours stopping to talk. Money is always carefully managed. Food comes first. Everything else has to fit around it. Sophea’s grandmother has difficulty walking. Going to … More When being included is not enough
Women’s empowerment is a complex thing. Especially when it becomes woven into the infrastructure of development itself. In WASH programs, involving women often appears not only appropriate, but obvious. Women are closely connected to water, hygiene, sanitation, childcare, household health, and everyday care work. They know the rhythms of households and communities. They know who … More Empowering Women or Expanding Women’s Work?
This post begins a short series reflecting on the field experiences and questions that shaped my recent book, Social Impact with the Capability Approach: Unlocking Development Stories in Vietnam and Cambodia. The ideas in the book did not emerge neatly from theory alone — they were shaped by real-world tensions, institutional constraints, and unexpected moments … More When Distance Became Insight: Evaluating Social Impact in Vietnam and Cambodia
For many years, evaluation in higher education equity has been dominated by a familiar set of questions: Who gets in? Who stays? Who completes? These questions matter. But they are also deeply limited. They privilege institutional accountability over student experience, numerical indicators over lived realities, and compliance over justice. They rarely ask harder questions about … More From Measuring Access to Practising Justice: Why Indigenous Data Sovereignty Matters for Evaluation
I came across this piece Bên vỉa hè Sài Gòn in the Chiêu Dương (Sunrise) newspaper, a Vietnamese newspaper in Sydney Australia, on the eve of April 30 — a date many Vietnamese living in the diaspora refer to as Tháng Tư Đen (Black April), marking the fall of Saigon. This piece captures the sentiment … More Lives at the Crossroads of Sài Gòn
Lien Pham 