LOCATION Residence of British Ambassador

SPEAKER HE Andrew Mace

DATE 22/10/2009

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am very pleased to be able to welcome all of you today to this meeting of the British Chevening Alumni Association of Cambodia.  And to congratulate you on the first anniversary of the association’s founding.

We were very pleased when a number of our former scholars took the initiative to found the association.  I think that it provides an excellent way for our former scholars and fellows to stay in touch with one another and with the Embassy.

Those who study through our Chevening programmes are many of the brightest and most promising young leaders in Cambodia – whether that is in government work, in the private sector, or in development and civil society based organisations.

The alumni association provides a forum for you to learn from each other’s academic and professional knowledge, to share experience and best practice, to build wider professional networks to support you in your careers, and to strengthen friendships.

It is a network that the Embassy is pleased to be able to support and also to draw on too.  One example this year has been the opportunity for us to work with a number of Chevening alumni who have studied or work in the environmental field as a way of developing ideas on our support for Cambodia’s work to combat climate change.

We hope that the association will increasingly also be able to offer other opportunities to its members.  One example was the training in leadership skills that we were able to provide earlier this year for two of the association’s members in Kuala Lumpur, working with British alumni associations in other countries of the region.  We hope that the association will be able to offer more local and regional opportunities of this sort in the future, and build links to alumni in neighbouring countries.

The meeting today is an opportunity to identify ways in which you can all benefit as individuals from the association, and how you can collectively increase its activities and profile.  The Embassy is ready and willing to support you in any way it can to achieve your goals.

I would like to finish by thanking you all for coming today, to wish you success for your discussions this evening, and to congratulate the association once again on reaching its first anniversary.

Thank you.

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