http://www.netmag.co.uk
One of the world’s poorest countries is leapfrogging its way to the latest internet technology, and a group of young, motivated bloggers are spearheading the revolution. Geoffrey Cain reports
With its jagged, pot-holed streets and swarms of begging children, visitors are often shocked at the poverty in Cambodia, widely considered Asia’s backwater behind Vietnam and China. Shacks and slums are testament to a third of the population earning less than half a US dollar a day and Transparency International ranks the country, only recently freed from years of civil war, coups and rigged elections, as the 14th most corrupt in the world.
Yet tech-savvy youngsters are bringing a new voice to Phnom Penh’s poverty-wrought landscape. Hanging out in cafes and clicking away on their laptops, they comprise a small but growing middle-class of baby-boomers born during the 1980s, after the Khmer Rouge genocide left 2million Cambodians – a quarter of the population – dead. Now they’ve come of age, and they’re wiring Cambodia with it.
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