Her Quiet Work

Author: Siv Vatana

  • Beyond the Deliverables: What Managing a Complex Project Taught Me

    Beyond the Deliverables: What Managing a Complex Project Taught Me

    A project plan can look clear on paper. It has objectives, activities, a timeline, a budget, and expected outcomes. But once implementation begins, the work becomes more complicated. People have different responsibilities, unexpected challenges arise, and decisions made in one area can affect another.

    I came to understand this more deeply while managing the Foreign Investment Mapping project at Open Development Cambodia (ODC) from 2021 to 2024. The project aimed to make information about foreign investment in Cambodia more accessible through research, data, and an interactive bilingual platform. ODC’s original announcement introduced the platform in February 2022.

    Looking back, I realise that much of my work happened beyond the deliverables themselves—in the coordination, decisions, and conversations that helped bring different parts of the project together.

    Managing the moving parts

    The project brought together research, data, and technical work around a subject that required us to build a shared understanding across different areas of expertise. We needed to turn information from different sources into something people could explore and understand.

    Colleagues seated in a meeting room while a team member presents on a projector screen.
    Colleagues seated in a meeting room while a team member presents on a projector screen.

    This involved more than collecting data. We had to consider what information was available, how it should be organised, how the platform should present it, and how users could navigate and access it.

    Like many organisations in the sector, we ran several donor-funded projects at once, and their deadlines and reporting often overlapped. Each had its own activities, deadlines, budgets, reporting requirements, and expected outcomes. A decision that seemed straightforward for one project could affect the workload or timing of another.

    My responsibility was to keep track of these moving parts without losing sight of what each project was meant to achieve. I monitored progress against activity plans, followed up on deadlines and budgets, identified implementation risks, and worked with colleagues to address challenges. Some issues could be resolved within the team; others required discussion with management or the donor.

    The proposal gave us the initial direction, but implementation required continuous attention to the realities of the work. We had to consider what was achievable with the information, time, resources, and people available.

    Tracking activities and milestones helped me monitor progress, while also considering what those activities depended on, where difficulties might emerge, and what needed to happen next to keep the project moving.

    Turning uncertainty into direction

    One of the challenges of working across research and technical development was that the different parts of the project could not operate independently. The information that the data and research team collected needed to be organised meaningfully, and the technical team needed a clear understanding of how that information would be presented to users.

    This also meant listening to perspectives beyond the project team. Sectoral consultations helped gather input on foreign investment data and information, informing discussions about how the dataset and profile page could be enhanced. This ODC article describes one of the consultations that informed the work.

    My role was to help connect these areas, keep the intended outcomes in view, and make sure that questions or difficulties were raised early enough to address them.

    Alongside tracking activities and milestones, regular communication with the team helped me stay informed about progress, hear about emerging challenges, and discuss what needed attention before it affected other parts of the work.

    Not every issue had an immediate answer. Sometimes we needed to reconsider the available information, clarify a requirement, or discuss whether an adjustment was necessary. When a decision affected the wider project, I had to make sure the relevant people were informed and that the team understood the direction.

    I was also learning to balance the detail of individual tasks with the wider picture. A team member might be focused on completing a particular piece of work, while I needed to consider how it fitted into the project timeline, budget, other commitments, and expected outcomes.

    Neither perspective was more important than the other. My responsibility was to connect them so that the work could progress with a clearer sense of priority.

    Trust is built through consistency

    Reporting was another important part of my project-management responsibilities. I prepared donor reports for review by the Executive Director, working to make the progress, results, challenges, and reasons for any adjustments clear.

    I did not see a report as simply a record of activities completed. It needed to explain what had been achieved, what had proved difficult, and what the available evidence told us about the project’s progress.

    When donors requested clarification, I needed to understand the implementation details well enough to respond accurately and explain the context behind our decisions. That required staying close to the work throughout the project, not just gathering information when a reporting deadline approached.

    Over time, I came to see how consistency in reporting mattered. When the progress, challenges, and explanations were clear, others could understand where the project stood and why certain decisions had been made.

    For me, that was one way of building trust through the everyday work of managing a project.

    The pressure a project manager carries

    Managing several projects at once meant that I was often thinking about things beyond the immediate tasks in front of the team: deadlines, budgets, donor expectations, reporting commitments, and the risks that could affect whether we achieved our intended outcomes.

    Not all of these concerns needed to be passed directly to the people doing the work. But I still needed to make sure they understood when priorities changed, when a decision affected their responsibilities, or when a challenge required their attention.

    I became more conscious of the difference between keeping a team informed and transferring my own pressure to them. I wanted colleagues to feel able to raise problems early, ask questions, and focus on the work they were responsible for.

    When a wider issue arose, I needed to work through it, seek advice or a decision where necessary, and communicate what the team needed to know.

    Of course, I could not shield the team from every difficulty, and I did not always have an immediate solution. Sometimes the best thing I could do was make the situation clearer: what had changed, what we needed to resolve, and what we could still move forward with.

    This experience deepened my understanding of a thought I have returned to often: my pressure can become someone else’s pressure.

    How I communicate a concern, respond to a setback, or clarify a priority can affect how other people experience their work.

    For me, this does not mean a project manager should carry every problem alone. It means being thoughtful about how responsibility is shared, so that people have the information and support they need without being burdened by uncertainty that has not yet translated into something they can act on.

    Recognising an opportunity beyond the original plan

    The Foreign Investment Mapping project also influenced how I thought about the information we were making accessible.

    As I became more interested in corporate social responsibility and responsible business, I started paying closer attention to discussions about transparency and the environmental and social impacts of business activity. I began to see a connection between investment information and wider questions about how businesses disclose information about their practices and responsibilities.

    I saw an opportunity to bring these questions into a broader conversation.

    Before the Foreign Investment Mapping project closed, I helped initiate and organise a multi-stakeholder dialogue on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting in Cambodia. ODC hosted it in Phnom Penh on 8 August 2024 and described it as the first multi-stakeholder dialogue on ESG in the country. It brought together 75 participants from government, the private sector, NGOs, universities, journalism, and communities, under the theme “Leveraging Data and Information Disclosure for Responsible Business.” ODC’s report on the dialogue has the details.

    It was an additional initiative alongside my project responsibilities. It grew out of my interest in responsible business and my belief that data and information disclosure could contribute to a wider discussion. I am grateful to ODC’s leadership and board, the speakers, and my colleagues, who made it possible.

    This was an additional initiative I pursued alongside my project responsibilities. It grew out of my own interest in responsible business and my belief that the work around data and information disclosure could contribute to a wider discussion.

    I could not know what might follow from starting that conversation. My intention was to bring different perspectives into the room and create an opportunity to discuss an emerging issue in Cambodia.

    I shared more about the thinking and work behind the dialogue in Behind the Dialogue: What It Took to Bring Cambodia’s First Multi-Stakeholder Conversation on ESG to Life.

    Looking back, I value this experience because it showed me how familiarity with a project can help you notice questions beyond its original deliverables.

    Recognising that opportunity was only the beginning. Turning it into a dialogue still took planning, coordination, and the practical work of bringing people together, and it took a team to do it.

    Six colleagues posing with raised fists after a consultation workshop in December 2022.
    Photo with my colleagues after finishing a consultation workshop in December 2022. The Foreign Investment Mapping dashboard was made possible by the technical team’s expertise and collective effort, alongside the wider project team’s contributions and support.

    What I carry forward

    Managing the Foreign Investment Mapping project strengthened my understanding of how project management works in practice. Plans, budgets, timelines, and indicators provide necessary structure, but they do not remove the need for judgement.

    The work also requires listening, following up, making decisions with the information available, and adjusting when circumstances change.

    I also came to appreciate how closely implementation, communication, and trust are connected. A project is not managed only through its formal milestones. It is managed through the many decisions and interactions that help people understand their responsibilities, address challenges, and keep working towards a shared outcome.

    Some of this work is visible in the final product or report. Much of it is not.

    Yet these less visible responsibilities shaped how I approached my role and how I understood the kind of manager I wanted to become.

    I am still learning. But I now pay closer attention not only to what a project needs to deliver, but also to how the work is organised, how decisions are communicated, and how people are supported along the way.

    The deliverables matter. So does the work behind them—and the people who make them possible.

    Explore the work

    Foreign Investment Mapping:

    The Foreign Investment Mapping project brought together research, data, and interactive tools to make information about major foreign investment projects in Cambodia more accessible.

    Related responsible-business resources:

    The work my team and I did to make foreign investment information more accessible also contributed to my interest in how data and information disclosure could support wider discussions about responsible business.

    These are ODC’s current pages. I can’t speak to how they have changed since I left.

    Written in a personal capacity. These reflections are mine and do not represent Open Development Cambodia.

  • Beyond the Title: The Leader I’m Learning to Become

    Beyond the Title: The Leader I’m Learning to Become

    At Up:Skill, I listened to women at very different stages of their careers.

    Some were just beginning.

    Some were already leading teams.

    Some were changing direction.

    Some were still trying to understand where they belonged.

    I came into the programme thinking mostly about what I wanted to learn.

    I left thinking more about what it means to become the senior person in the room.

    After years of taking responsibility for projects, working with different stakeholders, and helping teams deliver, I found myself asking a more personal question:

    What kind of leader am I becoming along the way?

    Because the pressure changes as we move through our careers. And so does our responsibility for the people around us.

    The pressure changes when you become senior

    Earlier in my career, I knew what it felt like to be the junior person.

    You want to do well.

    You don’t want to make mistakes.

    You want people to trust your work.

    Sometimes, you’re trying to understand expectations that nobody has explained clearly.

    You’re learning while also trying to prove that you’re capable of learning.

    Later, when you become more senior, the pressure doesn’t disappear.

    It changes.

    You have deadlines.

    You’re accountable for decisions.

    People depend on you.

    There are expectations from management, partners, donors and the people you supervise.

    You have your own work to deliver while also trying to help other people deliver theirs.

    And then I began to notice something I hadn’t thought about enough before:

    My pressure can become someone else’s pressure.

    When I’m worried about a deadline, that urgency can travel down the team.

    When I want something done perfectly, someone else may hear that as: Don’t make a mistake.

    When I’m carrying the weight of a project, I have to be careful not to make someone junior carry the weight of my anxiety, too.

    That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

    Listening to women at Up:Skill made me think more carefully about the experiences people carry into a room and about the kind of leader I want to be for them.

    Am I creating pressure, or creating opportunity?

    I still expect people to do good work.

    I still care about deadlines, quality and accountability.

    But I’ve become more interested in what happens between those expectations and the final result.

    Can someone take ownership of something instead of only following instructions?

    Can they try something they haven’t done before?

    Can they present an idea?

    Can they make a mistake and learn from it?

    Can they see an opportunity I might not have seen?

    Sometimes leadership isn’t about pushing harder.

    Sometimes it’s about opening a door.

    Giving someone a piece of work they’re ready to grow into.

    Letting them explore an idea.

    Encouraging them to speak.

    Giving feedback that helps rather than simply corrects.

    Recognising a contribution, even when it seems small.

    As we grow into more senior roles, it’s easy to become so focused on getting things right that we forget what it felt like to be learning.

    I want to remember that feeling.

    Not to lower the standards I set for myself or others, but to make sure that the people working with me have room to ask questions, try new things and grow into their responsibilities.

    Because the kind of support we receive early in our careers can shape the kind of support we later offer to others.

    I don’t want to forget what it felt like to be on the other side.

    I want to hold on to that understanding as I grow.

    Motherhood made me notice something else

    Becoming a mother also changed the way I think about people’s capacity.

    Not their capability.

    Their capacity.

    Someone can be capable of doing something and still not have unlimited energy, attention or time.

    There can be responsibilities outside work that nobody in the office sees.

    There can be exhaustion that doesn’t appear on a CV.

    There can be a difficult week that has nothing to do with someone’s commitment to their work.

    I don’t think this means lowering expectations.

    For me, it means becoming more curious about what a person needs in order to do good work.

    Sometimes they need clearer direction.

    Sometimes they need more time.

    Sometimes they need encouragement.

    Sometimes they need a challenge.

    And sometimes they simply need someone to trust that they’re capable of growing into the opportunity.

    I’m still learning how to tell the difference.

    I don’t always get it right. But I want to keep asking the question rather than assuming that everyone has the same capacity, circumstances or needs.

    Because supporting people doesn’t mean deciding what they can or cannot do.

    Sometimes it means creating the conditions in which they can find out for themselves.

    Then there is the question of recognition

    As I’ve reflected on my career, I’ve also found myself wondering how much of my sense of impact depends on recognition.

    • Do I need to win a major award to know that I’ve made an impact?
    • Do I need a bigger platform, a more visible title, or recognition from people outside my immediate community before the work I do can count as meaningful?

    I don’t have a neat answer.

    Recognition matters.

    It can make someone’s work visible. It can open doors. It can create opportunities that might otherwise be difficult to reach.

    I know that because being recognised at Up mattered to me.

    I appreciated the opportunity to be part of the community and, later, to share my experience with another cohort. Those moments reminded me that the experiences we carry can be useful to someone else, too.

    But visibility and impact aren’t always the same thing.

    Some of the things that matter most in a person’s career may never become an award.

    A junior colleague becomes more confident because someone gave her room to try.

    Someone applies for an opportunity because another woman encouraged her.

    Someone stays in a field because, at some point, she felt that she belonged there.

    Someone who was once supported becomes the person who supports someone else.

    You may never know the full distance that a small act of encouragement travels.

    And perhaps that’s what makes these forms of impact so difficult to measure. They don’t always come with a clear starting point, a completion date or a result we can claim as our own.

    Maybe impact takes longer than recognition

    We’re often taught to look for evidence of impact.

    Numbers.

    Outputs.

    Promotions.

    Awards.

    People reached.

    Projects completed.

    Those things matter, especially in the kind of work I’ve spent my career doing.

    I’ve worked with data, information platforms, research and stakeholder engagement. I’ve seen the value of making information accessible and useful, and of creating opportunities for people to use it in their work.

    Measurement matters. Evidence matters. Results matter.

    But I’ve also come to appreciate that not everything meaningful can be captured in a report.

    A conversation that changes how someone thinks.

    A connection between two people that continues without you.

    A person who becomes more confident because you trusted them with something.

    A younger colleague who eventually becomes a leader herself.

    You may not see the result immediately.

    You may never see it at all.

    And perhaps that’s one of the uncomfortable things about doing work intended to create change in other people and communities.

    Sometimes, you don’t get to see what your contribution becomes.

    I think about that when I look back at some of the connections that began around Up:Skill.

    I couldn’t have known in 2023 where every relationship would eventually lead.

    Some became friendships.

    Some became professional connections.

    Some crossed organisational boundaries.

    Some continued in ways I may never fully know.

    Not everything we start is ours to finish.

    Sometimes our contribution is simply being there at the beginning.

    Making an introduction.

    Sharing an experience.

    Offering encouragement.

    Creating a little more room for someone else to find their way.

    And then allowing the connection to become something beyond us.

    The kind of senior woman I want to become

    I don’t know exactly what my long-term impact will be.

    I don’t know whether it will be attached to a particular project, an award, an organisation or a title.

    But I’ve started to care more about a different question:

    What do the people around me experience because I was there?

    Did I make it easier for someone to speak?

    Did I create an opportunity?

    Did I help someone see something differently?

    Did I make a difficult piece of work feel possible?

    Did I pass pressure down simply because I was carrying it myself?

    Or did I create enough space for someone else to grow?

    These questions don’t belong neatly on a performance review.

    There’s no award category for them.

    But they’ve started to matter to me.

    Maybe that’s also part of why I started Her Quiet Work.

    I wanted a place to think about the parts of work that don’t always fit into a CV, a project report or a job title.

    The decisions made quietly.

    The people who influence us without knowing it.

    The opportunities we create for someone else.

    The things we learn from a room and carry somewhere else.

    And the question of what all of this is ultimately for.

    I still don’t know how long it takes to understand the full impact of our work. Maybe sometimes we never know.

    But I’m becoming more comfortable with not having to wait for an award, a title or a larger stage to decide that the work matters.

    I can pay attention to the room I’m in.

    To the pressure I carry into it.

    To the opportunities I open.

    To the people who might need a little more space to find their voice.

    And perhaps the answer isn’t to know exactly what impact I’ll leave, but to be more intentional about the impact I create along the way.

    To become the kind of senior woman I once needed to see.

  • The Programme Ended. The Community Didn’t.

    The Programme Ended. The Community Didn’t.

    When I joined Women In Tech’s Up:Skill programme in 2023, I signed up for a CSR session connected to my work at the time.

    I came for the content. I stayed for the room.

    As I shared in my earlier story, When I Signed Up for a CSR Session and Found a Community, I gained new skills, met new people, and made useful connections. More unexpectedly, I found a community of women with whom I could learn, share, and grow.

    I did not yet know how much of that connection would continue after the programme ended.

    A coffee with no agenda

    In June 2024, some of us from the first cohort arranged a small meetup at Sneha Center.

    There was no workshop. No facilitator. No agenda to complete.

    We simply wanted to see each other again.

    By then, we had all returned to our own work and responsibilities. Yet the conversation felt easy, as if the programme had never really ended.

    We talked about work, life, what we were learning, and what had happened since we last sat together as a cohort.

    It was a small meeting, but it made me realise that something had continued beyond the programme structure.

    The connection had become ours.

    Sometimes the connection finds its way into the work

    Some of the relationships from Up:Skill also found their way into our professional lives.

    In 2024, the Community Lead and I stayed connected and helped coordinate speakers for a gender and technology session initiated by the regional team at Open Development Mekong as part of an ICT gathering in Siem Reap.

    Neither of us was there in person.

    We simply helped make the connections from behind the scenes.

    It was a small example of something I was beginning to notice: relationships built in one space can travel into completely different spaces.

    Over time, I also had opportunities to connect people from my professional circle with people in the Up:Skill network. Some of those connections continued to grow beyond my direct involvement.

    By 2025, connections across our professional networks had also contributed to collaboration between our organisations, including a multi-stakeholder conversation on AI and gender inclusion.

    By then, I had already left my full-time role at Open Development Cambodia and was not involved in the event’s detailed planning or discussions. I saw the collaboration come together when the event took place.

    I found that quietly satisfying.

    Not because the event was mine. It wasn’t.

    But because a connection I had once helped make had continued to grow beyond my own involvement.

    There is something meaningful about that kind of connection. You don’t have to hold onto it or be part of every conversation. Sometimes, you simply introduce people, and the relationship takes its own path.

    And the same was true of the relationships I had built with the women themselves. Beyond collaborations and professional opportunities, some continued to show up for me—joining events I hosted, sharing feedback, listening, and cheering me on.

    I began to realise that a community’s value is not measured only by what its members accomplish together. Sometimes, it is also found in the connections they carry forward, the opportunities they help create for one another, and the care they continue to show long after the original programme ends.

    And then I returned to the room

    In December 2025, something unexpected happened.

    I was invited back to an Up:Skill alumni networking event as a speaker for a fireside conversation with alumni from the first and second cohorts.

    This time, I wasn’t sitting in the audience as a participant.

    I was one of the people sharing the experience.

    We talked about what we had learned from the programme, what we had applied afterwards, professional growth, big wins, funny failures, and the unexpected turns our careers had taken.

    When I looked back at my own experience, one session came to mind especially clearly: the self-love session.

    It was where I learned to practise greater love and kindness towards myself. For those of us in Cohort 1, it also became a turning point in how we connected with one another. As we listened to each other’s experiences as girls and women—whether as leaders, junior team members, or students at different stages of our lives and careers—we began to feel a deeper sense of connection and emotional support.

    I told the second cohort that the experience had stayed with me in ways I had not expected.

    It continues to shape the environment I want to create for younger people I work with: one where they feel encouraged to pursue the work they care about and have the space to discover and exercise their talents.

    But there was another part of the story I wanted them to know.

    Even after the programme ended, some of my Cohort 1 alumni stayed connected to me through my professional work. They made time in their busy lives to join events I hosted, participate in discussions, share feedback, cheer me on, listen, and applaud.

    Sometimes it was simply a message.

    Sometimes it was showing up in the room.

    Sometimes it was taking a seat at an event where we could continue learning together, raise our voices, or simply listen to one another.

    These gestures may have looked small from the outside, but they never felt small to me.

    They made me feel seen. They reminded me that what I was doing mattered to someone beyond my workplace.

    And I remember wondering:

    Is this what it feels like to be part of a community? Is this what belonging feels like?

    Perhaps it is.

    So, when I had the opportunity to speak with the second cohort, I wanted to thank my Cohort 1 alumni in front of the wider community.

    I wanted the newer cohort to know that these women were not simply people I had once shared a programme with. They were still part of my journey, and I was grateful that our connection had continued.

    In 2023, I was there to learn. In 2025, I was invited back to share. Not because of a title or position, but simply as a Cohort 1 alumna who had once been sitting where they were.

    I hoped that something from my experience might stay with them, just as something from the programme had stayed with me.

    The room had changed.

    And so had I.

    A community can change form

    Looking back, I realise that what stayed with me was not only what I learned during the programme, but also what grew from it afterwards.

    A community does not always remain a group of people meeting regularly in the same room.

    Sometimes it becomes a message. A familiar face at an event. An invitation to collaborate. Someone taking the time to listen.

    The programme gave us the first room. What happened afterwards depended on what we chose to nurture —and the opportunities we had to stay connected.

    Perhaps some of the quietest work of a programme begins not when the sessions are running, but when they are over.

    Not every participant will remain connected. Not every cohort will become a lasting community. And perhaps that cannot be designed or guaranteed.

    But programme designers can create the conditions for connection to continue: opportunities to reconnect, spaces where people can contribute, and a culture that values relationships beyond the formal sessions.

    Because sometimes, the most meaningful outcome is not only what people take away from a programme.

    It is what they continue to give to one another afterwards.

    The programme ended.

    The community didn’t.

    And they kept showing up across different chapters of my work.

  • When I Signed Up for a CSR Session and Found a Community

    When I Signed Up for a CSR Session and Found a Community

    In 2023, I joined the first cohort of Up:skill Women in Tech, a programme organised by the Cambodia Academy of Digital Technology (CADT), Digital Transformation Center Cambodia (DTC), and GIZ.

    The programme brought together women from different backgrounds and career stages for sessions on technology, professional development, leadership, and other parts of working life.

    I didn’t join because I was looking for a community.

    I joined because I saw a session on corporate social responsibility.

    The CSR session that first brought me into Up:skill.

    At the time, I was working on a foreign investment project and expanding a dataset on companies involved in CSR activities in Cambodia. Most of my previous exposure to CSR had been through the civil society side, so I was curious about how companies themselves understood it.

    I wanted to hear a different perspective.

    That was the reason I signed up.

    I didn’t know that the session would eventually lead me somewhere else.

    I came for the content. I stayed for the room.

    Every weekend, we learned from different experts and then had space to talk with one another.

    The CSR session may have been what first brought me into the room, but it was not the only reason I kept coming back.

    Each session offered something different—new ideas, practical exercises, conversations about technology and careers, and moments that made me reflect on my own work and growth.

    Looking back, I think I learned in more than one way—through the sessions, through the work we did together, and through the people I met along the way.

    What stayed with me wasn’t only what we learned.

    It was the room.

    There were women who were just starting their careers and women who were already leading teams. There were people from different sectors, generations and professional experiences.

    Yet, somehow, the usual distance between senior and junior felt smaller.

    People shared openly.

    There wasn’t much pressure to have the perfect answer or to present yourself as someone who already had everything figured out.

    You could simply talk about what you had experienced.

    I found myself looking forward to those weekends.

    There was something about being around women who could talk honestly about work, ambition, uncertainty and life that felt different.

    The session I still remember

    One session about self-love has stayed with me.

    The conversation moved beyond the usual professional topics.

    Women talked about their experiences as girls, as women, as leaders and as junior staff. Some shared things that were difficult. Others listened.

    There was very little judgement.

    What struck me was how people seemed to value one another not by their title or position, but by how far they had come.

    For a few hours, nobody needed to prove that they deserved to be there.

    We were simply women trying to understand ourselves and our lives a little better.

    I think that was one of the first times I consciously noticed how much the design of a space affects what people are willing to bring into it.

    People can know a lot and still remain quiet.

    They can have good ideas and still hesitate to share them.

    They can be capable of leading and still wonder whether they are good enough.

    Sometimes what changes that is not another lesson.

    Sometimes it is the room.

    And eventually, that room became a place where we had to build something together.

    Later in the programme, we were divided into groups and asked to develop a project.

    Our team brought together women from different sectors and different stages of life. We had our jobs, responsibilities and busy schedules outside the programme, but somehow we found a way to work together.

    We came up with an idea for Women and Tech Talks, a podcast concept to connect Cambodian women in technology and create more opportunities for professional women and younger girls to learn from one another.

    We worked through the details together: the purpose, format, language, platforms and how the idea could continue beyond the programme.

    We didn’t begin the project thinking about awards.

    But when the results were announced, our team received the Best Project Initiative award.

    I was happy, of course.

    But another moment surprised me even more.

    Someone noticed me

    I was nominated for the Ideator Award, recognising participants who actively shared and expressed ideas during the programme.

    I hadn’t expected it.

    In my working life, I tend to pay more attention to the work itself—to the team, the project, the problem we are trying to solve, and what could be improved.

    I don’t usually enter a room thinking about whether someone will notice me.

    So being nominated made me pause.

    It made me wonder what other people had seen in me that I hadn’t noticed in myself.

    At that point in my life, I was carrying many different roles.

    I was a team leader. A project manager. A wife. A mother.

    There were always things to deliver and people to think about.

    From the outside, I probably looked like I was simply getting on with things.

    But being recognised reminded me that the things we quietly do—sharing an idea, helping a team move forward, making a connection, speaking up when something matters—can also be visible to someone else.

    Sometimes we don’t realise we are being seen.

    I left with more than I came for

    Looking back, I still remember the CSR session that first brought me into Up:skill.

    It gave me a perspective I was looking for.

    But it wasn’t the most important thing I took away.

    I also left with memories of women speaking honestly, working together and encouraging one another – and with a little more belief in myself.

    I joined because I wanted to learn something.

    Somewhere along the way, I found a community.

    At the time, I thought that might be where the story ended.

    It wasn’t.

  • Behind the Dialogue: What It Took to Bring Cambodia’s First Multi-Stakeholder Conversation on ESG to Life

    Behind the Dialogue: What It Took to Bring Cambodia’s First Multi-Stakeholder Conversation on ESG to Life

    I still remember the sound of the room before I remember anything else — chairs being shifted into rows, someone testing a microphone twice, small conversations overlapping in Khmer and English near the coffee table.

    It was the morning of 8 August 2024, at the Himawari Hotel in Phnom Penh, not yet 8:30.

    By the end of the day, 75 people would have taken part in the conversation — business representatives, university students, researchers, civil society program managers, and people from the public who simply wanted to understand what “ESG” actually meant.

    Nobody in that room fully agreed on what ESG should look like in Cambodia.

    That was, in a quiet way, the whole point of the day.

    Ms. Sin Kimsean, a Board Member of ODC, giving a welcoming remark.

    You can read what happened once the day began — the agenda, the two panels, and what the speakers discussed — in the two event write-ups:

    What neither post tells you is what it took to get that room to exist in the first place.

    This is that story.

    It didn’t start with a concept note

    It started years earlier, during the COVID-19 lockdowns, in front of a spreadsheet.

    My team and I were working on a foreign-investment project, building a reliable dataset on foreign investment in Cambodia, field by field, company by company. It was slow, careful work — the kind that happens over months and years rather than in a single visible moment.

    That work eventually grew into an interactive dashboard, built as part of the same project, well before the dialogue was ever conceived.

    At first, the dashboard seemed like the natural endpoint: organise the information, make it accessible, and help people understand where foreign investment was going.

    Leaflet of the FIM data dashboard displayed at the multi-stakeholder dialogue on ESG on 8 August 2024, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

    But the more we worked with the data, the more I realised that knowing where investment was going was only one part of the picture.

    Cambodia was actively positioning itself to attract and promote investment. The 2021 Law on Investment established an open, transparent and predictable framework intended to attract both Cambodian and foreign investors, while also strengthening Cambodia’s links to regional and global supply chains.

    That made me wonder about what happens beyond the investment figures.

    Attracting investment is one part of the story. What happens after that investment arrives is another.

    How do businesses operate? How do they manage environmental and social risks? How do they affect workers and communities? And as Cambodian businesses become increasingly connected to regional and global supply chains, how do they respond to the environmental, social and human-rights expectations that come with those markets?

    The more we worked with foreign-investment data, the more I became interested in that second part of the story.

    What does “responsible business” actually mean in Cambodia, and who gets to define it?

    That question pulled us toward ESG.

    Choosing ESG as an entry point

    Much of the civil society space I knew was still working on the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) side of environmental accountability — and for good reason. Public access to EIA information remained a challenge.

    But I had also sat across the table from enough business owners and investors to notice something about how conversations could begin.

    When the starting point is violations, non-compliance, or what a company has done wrong, the conversation can quickly become defensive. That doesn’t mean the concerns are unimportant. It means the starting point itself can make it harder for people to stay engaged.

    I began wondering whether EIA was the only way to enter a broader conversation about responsible business.

    ESG offered a different entry point.

    Businesses and investors were already talking about environmental and social issues through the language of risk, investment, market access and long-term growth. That created an opportunity to put environmental and social responsibility into the same conversation as business interests, rather than treating them as separate conversations happening on opposite sides of a table.

    That distinction mattered to me.

    So my team and I turned our attention there.

    And almost immediately, we ran into a different obstacle.

    Not resistance.

    Noise.

    ESG came wrapped in an ever-growing collection of standards, taxonomies, reporting requirements and disclosure frameworks. A government officer, a factory representative, a legal researcher, a civil society program manager and a university student could all use the word “ESG” while coming from completely different reference points.

    Before asking people to agree, I thought, perhaps they first needed a chance to explain what they meant.

    I didn’t believe the answer was to wait until everyone had the same definition.

    I believed someone had to bring these people to the same table, on purpose, and let them define their terms out loud, in front of one another.

    And perhaps data could help create that space — not because data is always neutral in how it is produced or interpreted, but because a well-grounded evidence base can give people something concrete to discuss without asking them to begin by taking a side.

    The part nobody sees in an event write-up

    What those two event posts don’t show is the six months before 8 August, spent largely outside the visible part of the project.

    Writing the concept note was the easy part.

    What followed was a lot of moving from meeting to meeting across Phnom Penh, trying to convince people who didn’t yet know our small project that this dialogue was worth their afternoon, their name, and, in some cases, their institution’s reputation.

    I was asking business association representatives, civil society organizations, law firms, and research institutes to sit on the same stage and say what they actually thought, in front of one another and 75 people in the room.

    Some conversations took one meeting.

    Others took several, followed by calls, messages and adjustments to how we explained the purpose of the event.

    There was always a question behind those conversations for me:

    Would people actually come?

    Not just physically attend, but genuinely participate?

    Because putting different sectors in the same room is one thing. Getting them to stay open to one another is another.

    All of this was happening against a project timeline that was closing and a budget that was shrinking — the two things that never wait until you feel ready.

    What got the event across the finish line wasn’t one clever idea.

    It was accumulated trust, collaboration and a lot of people quietly doing their part.

    The donor and partners backed the idea. The Executive Director and colleagues trusted that it was worth pursuing. A hired media team handled the filming and photography. Volunteers quietly took care of registration, minute-taking and other support on the day.

    None of what happened on stage existed by itself.

    There were months of conversations, follow-ups, coordination, small adjustments and people agreeing to contribute their time before anyone in the room heard the first panel question.

    That is the part an event report rarely captures.

    What made the day work

    The agenda is in the two linked posts above, but the agenda itself wasn’t what made the day work.

    What made it work was that the room allowed disagreement to remain in the room instead of turning into silence.

    A researcher could raise concerns about greenwashing and workers’ rights in the same conversation where a business representative could explain what was realistically achievable for a small factory with limited resources.

    Those perspectives didn’t always sit comfortably together.

    They didn’t need to.

    Nobody had to pretend to agree. They just had to stay in the conversation.

    And for a full day, they did.

    That was something I had thought about when putting the event together. I wasn’t trying to engineer agreement. If everyone already agreed, there would have been little reason to bring them together in the first place.

    The challenge was to create enough structure for different perspectives to be heard, and enough trust for people to express them without the conversation immediately becoming a standoff.

    A hired media team filmed every session, so the conversation didn’t end when the day did.

    The recordings remain available as part of the project’s public record:

    The event itself lasted one day.

    The conversation, at least in some form, could continue beyond it.

    The part that’s mine to keep

    The dialogue is written into the organisation’s institutional record now, and that’s exactly as it should be.

    Projects belong to institutions. Events become part of organisational history. People move on.

    But I know what it took to get people from several different sectors, who don’t usually finish each other’s sentences, to sit down and try anyway.

    As far as I know, some of the speakers from that stage are still in touch with one another today, collaborating across different platforms to push ESG discussions and adoption forward in Cambodia.

    That, more than the attendance number, is the outcome I remember most.

    Maybe that’s what I was really trying to create all along.

    Not simply a successful event, but a relationship that could survive the event.

    Dr Socheata Sao raises the idea of a publicly accessible platform that compiles ESG and sustainability reports from Cambodian companies in a Cambodianess article, “How Can Cambodia Embrace ESG Principles “, published on 23 November 2024.

    What stayed with me

    Looking back, I don’t think the most important thing I learned from that project was about ESG.

    It was about how conversations begin.

    Sometimes the biggest obstacle isn’t disagreement.

    It’s that people are starting from completely different places and using the same words to mean different things.

    Before asking people to find common ground, someone has to create a place where they can explain where they are standing.

    And sometimes the most useful role is not to have the answer, but to create the conditions for other people to have a conversation worth continuing.

    The data mattered.

    The research mattered.

    The concept note mattered.

    The budget mattered.

    The logistics definitely mattered.

    But none of those things, on their own, could bring five different sectors to the same table.

    People did that.

    Trust helped them stay there.

    And perhaps that is the quiet part of this kind of work that I have come to value most.

    You can organise the room, prepare the agenda, coordinate the speakers and make sure the microphone works.

    But in the end, you cannot manufacture a genuine conversation.

    You can only create the conditions for one to happen.

    The event lasted one day.

    The relationships didn’t.

    That’s the part I still carry with me.

    Written in a personal capacity. These reflections are mine and do not represent Open Development Cambodia.

  • Beyond Access: Rethinking My Work Through Equity-Focused Design

    Beyond Access: Rethinking My Work Through Equity-Focused Design

    I recently completed Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design, the first seven courses in the Google UX Design Certificate on Coursera. I met the idea of equity-focused design in Module 2 of that course.

    I expected to come away with a new vocabulary—wireframes, prototypes, user journeys, design thinking. What I didn’t expect was for one concept, equity-focused design, to make me stop and look back at work I had already done.

    It felt strangely familiar.

    Not because I had formally studied equity-focused design before, but because I recognised some of the questions in work I had been doing for years.

    A concept that named what I already knew

    My work sits at the intersection of civil society, data, and content — managing research and publishing platforms, producing bilingual content, and building tools meant to make information more open and accessible.

    In that work, “the user” was never really an abstraction.

    It was someone with limited internet access, limited digital literacy, or limited data literacy, trying to find information that was rarely built with their reality in mind.

    That’s why equity-focused design landed so differently for me.

    It wasn’t a completely new idea I had to learn from scratch. It gave me language for something I had sensed through experience: making information available is not the same as making it usable.

    I had spent years helping put information online. But the course made me ask a slightly uncomfortable question:

    What happens after someone reaches the platform?

    Can they find what they need?

    Do they understand what they are looking at?

    Do they know what to do next?

    And what if the platform itself assumes a level of digital or data literacy that they don’t have?

    Those questions felt obvious once I started asking them. I’m not sure why I hadn’t been asking them in quite the same way before.

    Design as a bridge, not just a craft

    Perhaps that’s the shift this course gave me.

    I started seeing UX design less as a discipline concerned mainly with how something looks or functions, and more as another way of thinking about the gap between a system and the people expected to use it.

    My first training was in engineering, where I learned to think about systems, constraints, and how things are built to function. Years later, working with open data taught me to think about access to information—who has it, who doesn’t, and what information can make possible.

    UX is making me pay closer attention to what happens in between:

    What does a person actually experience when they encounter the system I helped build?

    That question feels relevant far beyond websites or applications.

    Recognising my own work in the framework

    This is where the course’s core principles — user-centred design, accessibility, and design thinking — stopped feeling like industry jargon and started feeling like a description of decisions I’d already been making instinctively, without a name for them.

    When I led the launch of a knowledge-sharing platform for civil society organisations, I was already thinking about who might struggle to use it — people with limited digital literacy, people more comfortable in Khmer than English, people with inconsistent internet access.

    I made choices around those realities.

    But I was doing it mostly through experience and instinct, rather than through a deliberate design process.

    I was reacting to barriers as I noticed them.

    The course made me realise that there is a difference between noticing a barrier and designing for it from the beginning.

    That distinction has stayed with me.

    It made me look differently at some of the platforms and content I had worked on—open data tools, learning portals, bilingual resources—and wonder where I had designed around people’s realities, and where I had simply made something available and hoped they could navigate the rest themselves.

    What “access” missed in my own work

    Looking back, I can see how much of my work treated digital transformation as an access problem:

    Get the platform online.

    Get the content published.

    Get the data open.

    And that mattered.

    But access was never the whole story.

    I’ve seen how someone can reach a platform and still not really be able to use it because the way it is structured assumes a level of digital or data literacy they don’t have.

    That’s not necessarily a connectivity problem.

    Sometimes it is a design problem.

    And I didn’t have the framework to fully see that distinction until now.

    For platforms like the ones I work on—intended to open information and knowledge sharing to civil society—the goal therefore cannot stop at putting content online.

    The content has to be findable.

    Understandable.

    Navigable.

    And meaningful to the people it is meant to serve.

    That sounds obvious as I write it now. But sometimes we only recognise the obvious after experience gives us a reason to look again.

    What I want to notice differently

    This course didn’t give me a brand-new mission.

    It changed what I notice.

    I’ve spent years working on platforms meant to make information and knowledge more open. What I’m taking from this course is a more deliberate way to think about the people on the other side of those platforms.

    Not just:

    Can they access it?

    But:

    Can they use it?

    And perhaps even more importantly:

    Were they considered when we designed it?

    That’s the shift I want to carry into future work—to apply equity-focused, user-centred thinking from the beginning, rather than waiting for barriers to appear and then trying to respond to them.

    I don’t think this course changed what I care about.

    It gave me a better way to see it.

    And maybe that’s what learning is sometimes supposed to do—not give us an entirely new way of working, but give us the language to understand our own work more clearly.

    I used to think more about whether people could reach the information.

    Now I’m thinking more about what happens once they get there.

  • A Small Joy I Still Carry

    A Small Joy I Still Carry

    While going back through old notes and photos to write these stories, I came across two Facebook posts I’d never properly sat with before—both from a week in March 2024, when we hosted Cambodia’s National Open Data Conference.

    One was from Kampuchea Sëla Handicap, showing young Cambodian adults with intellectual disabilities, their name tags still slightly crooked, having just spent two days in a room usually reserved for ministries, development organisations, and data professionals. The other was from Damnok Toek, whose director had joined one of our panels and spoken plainly about the need for Cambodia’s digital future to include people like the communities they represent.

    Reading those posts again, years later, settled into something quiet and warm. They were a small reminder that the care we had put into that week had reached people in a way that no report, agenda item, or project indicator could really capture.

    What I heard as a mother

    During the hackathon’s call for solutions on 2 March 2024, and again during the two-day conference disability panel, I found myself listening closely to struggles I’d rarely heard spoken about so plainly before.

    At the time, I was a mother of two, and I was deeply affected when speakers described how some children with disabilities end up in hospitals or care centres when families cannot care for them, and how stretched the organisations that step in can be.

    What stayed with me was not only the difficulty of their circumstances, but also how limited their access to technology and opportunities could be.

    We were gathered in a conference built around data, technology, and digital innovation. Yet some of the people who could benefit from that progress most were still struggling to have their voices heard.

    That made the idea of inclusion feel much more immediate to me.

    It was no longer just something I could write into a project plan or mention in a discussion about digital access. There were actual people sitting in the room, telling us what those barriers looked like from where they stood.

    A booth of their own

    That’s part of why, when Kampuchea Sëla Handicap and Damnok Toek Organisation joined the conference, I made sure they had a booth of their own—a small table where they could display fruit jam made at their centre, right alongside the panels, demonstrations, and data dashboards.

    It was a small decision, but it mattered.

    They were delighted simply to be there as participants, with something of their own to share. They weren’t there only as people being discussed in a disability-focused session; they were present as contributors, alongside everyone else.

    For those two days, I think they felt genuinely welcomed, heard, and included.

    And perhaps that was the point.

    Sometimes inclusion is not a complicated intervention. Sometimes it starts with noticing who is in the room, asking what would make it easier for them to participate, and then making space.

    What their words told me

    That’s really why those two posts meant so much to me.

    What moved me most was hearing that, perhaps for the first time in that kind of setting, technology practitioners had taken the time to sit down, listen, and learn from them—rather than arriving with a ready-made solution without first asking what people actually needed.

    Their words carried something I hadn’t expected: hope for more events like this, but also a quiet insistence that people with disabilities—organisations, representatives, and individuals alike—deserve an equal seat at the tables where policy and technology are discussed and shaped, not only at events created specifically for them.

    Kampuchea Sëla Handicap and Damnok Toek joined young tech innovators at the Open Data Day 2024 hackathon on 2 March 2024, sharing real-life challenges faced by people with disabilities and inspiring inclusive digital solutions.

    Looking back, that is probably the part of the conference I remember most clearly.

    It reminded me that inclusive development is not simply about inviting people into a project or adding an inclusion activity to a workplan. Sometimes it is about making space for people to participate, contribute, and be seen as part of the conversation from the beginning.

    And that’s really why I care so much about the work itself—the project, the plan, the people it’s meant to reach, and whether it actually makes a difference in their lives.

    Some things can matter enormously and still never show up in a workplan, a proposal, an annual report, or a performance review.

    But sometimes, years later, you come across a photograph or a few words from someone who was there—and you realise that the effort reached further than you knew.

    For me, that is what makes the work worth it.

    Want to explore the events further?

    If you’re curious about Open Data Day and Cambodia’s first National Open Data Conference in 2024, you can explore the event stories, videos, and outcomes report below:

    For more details, see the outcomes report.

    Written in a personal capacity. These reflections are mine and do not represent Open Development Cambodia.