In many societies, people with disabilities are pushed aside – be they mentally challenged or physically impaired. Some of them have to beg for money in the streets, others stay out of sight or are even locked away.

In Cambodia, the country’s Disability Action Council (DAC) estimates that nearly five percent of the population of 14.9 million people is disabled. According to the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), Cambodia’s high disability rates can be attributed to three main factors:
• “past war casualties
• the ongoing risk of mines,
• the lack of prevention and primary care for various disabling diseases.”

The Cambodian media don’t often deal with the lives of the disabled. One reason may be shyness or ignorance on the part of the journalists about the life of people with disabilities. But two recent television training workshops have helped improve the way journalists portray people with disabilities in the media. They were jointly organized by DW Akademie, Germany’s GIZ and the Women’s Media Centre of Cambodia.

Photo courtesy of Mimi_K at Flickr

For a long time, Cambodia’s notoriously landmined countryside had made it virtually impossible to create widespread communication between people. In 2010, only 2.6% of the population were connected to the landline telephone network. 1.4% of all Cambodians were Internet subscribers, most of them using dial-up connections to access the web.

On the other hand, mobile network operators in Cambodia registered more than 7.5 million connections in the same year – an increase of more than 6 million in just five years. Statistically speaking, 54% of all Cambodians owned a mobile phone in 2010.

The country is a particularly striking example for the scale of the “revolution” that mobile phone technology has triggered in developing countries in Asia and Africa. At the same time, third generation (3G) mobile cellular technology is enabling the spread of state-of-the-art data services, such as Internet access on mobile phones. So virtually overnight, people have been linked up to the communications structures of a globalized world – with all the political, economic and social ramification that entails.

By Raksmey Meas

Raksmey Meas, assistant lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, reports that Japan’s catastrophe involving the recent earthquake and subsequent tsunami has yet again taken center stage in the world media’s attention.

Particularly in Cambodia, news related to Japan and its disaster racked up on front pages for more than a week following the initial shock on March 11^th.

Regarding the focus of Cambodian media on this tragedy, news angles seem to be anything on the updates of the situation – death toll, possible nuclear explosion and rescue efforts, etc.