The Royal Government of Cambodia(RGC) has made great progress in economic growth, poverty reduction and human development, mainly from its agriculture, garment, construction, and tourism sectors. Like this, the economy of Cambodia at present follows an open market system and has seen rapid economic progress in the last decade. Currently, Cambodia emphasized the strategic vision of the government in shifting agriculture-dependent economy to a broad-based industrial and S&T-oriented economy. In year 2010, the Government of Cambodia emphasized that science and engineering human resources must play an important role in this development process and was seeking to develop a coherent, long-term policy regarding S&T and mathematics education.

In 2014, RGC has been designed to the National Strategic Development Plan 2014-2018(NSDP 2014-2018), a development framework and a road map for the implementation of Rectangular Strategy Phase III that lays out the political commitment to a socioeconomic development process. This included the planned actions to implement the prioritized policies and regarding S&T stressed a development of ICT, S&T and technical training. Driven by its long-term vision toward 2030, particularly as expressed in the "Rectangular Strategy ­ Phase III", in 2015, RGC has prepared and adopted Cambodia Industrial Development Policy 2015-2025(IDP 2015-2025) as a guide to promote the country's industrial development that will help maintain sustainable and inclusive high economic growth and reach a middle-income country status. In addition, RGC by the support of the Republic of Korea published Cambodia's National Science and Technology Master Plan 2014-2020 in 2013. This master plan is Cambodia's first national mid- and long-term S&T strategy, and focuses on establishing S&T foundation environment, activating S&T climate, securing R&D capabilities, and empowering of S&T based core industry capabilities.

In the organizational structure, RGC has established the National Science and Technology Council(NSTC)1) chaired by head of State, its General Secretariat, and its branches in all provinces in the country for promoting and coordinating the development of S&T in Cambodia in 2014. The General Secretariat of the National Science and Technology Council(GS-NSTC) plays the role as secretariat to improve the existing draft of the STI policy of Cambodia through a well coordination of all concerned stakeholders and all relevant agencies. The ambition of this establishment is for Cambodia to be in the same level of the countries in the regions and in the world in term of the scientific and technological development.

On this wise, the national policy of Cambodia stresses importantly on economic diversification, competitiveness strengthening, and productivity enhancement based on STI development in line with the structural transformation and industrial development. Therefore, S&T in Cambodia is considered one of the major requirements to achieve future national strategies. Along with this, Cambodia faces urgent need to establish and implement its first national STI policy, its action plans, and an efficient STI system. Overall, Cambodia has many challenges such as the needs of capacity to establish and implement national policies and institutional infrastructure on its own for S&T development.

In order to realize the visions of national development with sound STI capacity, it is necessary to enhance capacity of policymakers and other stakeholders in Cambodia as a part of its efforts to build a STI foundation at the early stage of STI policy development.

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