Chunly Sereyvicheth, PhD

Director, Centre for Governance and Public Innovation, CDRI

Key Messages:

• Cambodia's digital government challenge is now less about connectivity than citizen adoption: 76.9 percent of adults had not used a service.
• Two barriers—limited awareness and limited digital capability—together explain 92.1 percent of non-use.
• Different citizens need different responses: younger non-users lack awareness; older, less-educated ones need practical skills support.
• Delegated use should be recognised as a legitimate channel, with local officials, relatives, and intermediaries equipped to help citizens transact.
• Digital services deliver more value when front-end platforms are matched by back-end reforms that reduce paper and in-person requirements.

Cambodia has experienced rapid digital transformation over the past decade. Mobile network coverage extends across nearly all populated areas, active cellular subscriptions exceed the total population, and Cambodians have adopted commercial digital finance (mobile money and banking applications) with remarkable speed.

As the Kingdom advances its digital government agenda, set out in the Pentagonal Strategy-Phase I and the Cambodia Digital Government Policy, a different question comes into focus: how far citizens are engaging with the digital channels the state has built. Much attention has gone to what is being deployed. Less evidence exists on how citizens are receiving it.

Our new CDRI working paper addresses that gap, drawing on a nationally representative survey of 1,200 Cambodian adults across twelve provinces, conducted face-to-face in January 2026. We found that more than three-quarters of respondents (76.9 percent) had not used a government digital service in the preceding 12 months, while 21.4 percent had. The findings suggest this low uptake is associated less with connectivity or technology itself than with gaps in awareness and digital capability. But the data also reveals something deeper about how citizens navigate the state: a strong reliance on human intermediaries, and the lingering friction of paper-based bureaucracies.

Beyond Connectivity: Two Barriers, Not One

When asked for their main reason for not using a government digital service, non-users gave practical answers: 57.1 percent said they did not know how to use such applications, and 35.0 percent said they had not been aware the services existed (Figure 1). Together, these account for 92.1 percent of non-use. Concerns about data security (1.3 percent) and connectivity (1.0 percent) were marginal, and only 2.4 percent reported no need for government services that year.

Figure 1: Capability and awareness together account for 92.1 percent of non-use

Source: CDRI Digital Government Citizen Survey, 2026.

The awareness finding carries particular policy value: for roughly one-third of non-users, the main constraint is simply not knowing that relevant services exist.

The Same Gap, Different Citizens

These two barriers are not evenly distributed, and this is where the findings prove useful for programme design. Among non-users aged 16 to 25, 60.6 percent did not know the services existed, while 26.6 percent pointed to a lack of skills (Figure 2). Among those over 60, the pattern is close to reversed: 88.8 percent cited skills and 5.6 percent awareness.

Figure 2: The awareness barrier predominates among younger non-users; the skills barrier among older ones

Source: CDRI Digital Government Citizen Survey, 2026.

Education follows the same gradient. Younger, better-educated citizens are largely equipped to use these services once they become aware of them; older and less-educated citizens are often aware of them but do not yet feel able to use them. The implication is practical: communication campaigns are likely to be most effective for the first group, while the second benefits more from sustained digital skills support.

Where the Differences Lie—and Where They Do Not

Two further results are notable for what they did not show. The first concerns geography: rural and urban respondents reported similar levels of use (23.8 and 20.5 percent), a difference that is not statistically significant, and location did not predict engagement once other characteristics were accounted for. Location on its own does not distinguish users from non-users.

Where the differences lie is in education and digital skills. Use jumped from 10.2 percent among those with primary schooling to 73.7 percent at the post-secondary level, and from 7.7 percent among those who cannot install an application to 40.3 percent among those who can. These statistically robust disparities (Figure 3) demonstrate that independent digital adoption is structurally gated by formal education and technical capacity. For the majority of the population who fall below this threshold, direct, self-service engagement with these platforms currently remains out of reach.

Figure 3: Education and basic digital skills separate users from non-users far more sharply than location does

Source: CDRI Digital Government Citizen Survey, 2026.

Gender is also a comparable point. The gap in reported use between women and men (19.7 against 23.9 percent) is not statistically significant, but the gap in digital skills is larger and robust (35.8 against 49.2 percent able to install an application unaided). Once capability is accounted for, gender no longer predicts engagement, so where gender differences arise, they operate through digital skills, which is where policy attention would be most productive.

Delegated Use: A Channel in its Own Right

When asked what they would do if they could complete a government transaction online, 11.4 percent would do it themselves on their phone, 69.2 percent would go in person, and 19.4 percent would ask someone else, usually a relative or friend (9.6 percent) or a government official (8.4 percent), and occasionally a paid agent (1.4 percent) (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Roughly one in five citizens would reach a digital service through another person

Source: CDRI Digital Government Citizen Survey, 2026.

This middle group is interpreted as citizens’ pathway to independent use, although the evidence suggests otherwise: they come from lower education levels than even the majority who would attend in person. Delegated use may be a necessary channel through which many citizens access digital services, rather than the precursive step towards doing it themselves.

Completing the Journey

Approximately 64.5 percent of respondents expected that even after submitting an application online, they would still be required to visit a government office in person. This widespread perception—held by users and non-users of digital government services alike—plausibly reflects a genuine institutional reality rather than a misconception. The finding suggests that digital front-ends in Cambodia have advanced faster than the reform of legal and procedural back-ends. Because wet stamps, ink signatures, and in-person verification often remain statutory conditions for the legal validity of many civil documents, a stark "front-end/back-end gap" emerges. When citizens anticipate that an online application will not remove the physical steps required to complete a transaction, the expected time savings shrink. Consequently, they weigh these channels logically: if a physical visit is ultimately mandatory, the practical utility of initiating the process digitally is significantly diminished.

Designing for How Citizens Engage

None of this diminishes what has been achieved. The coverage, platforms, and policy architecture are real accomplishments, and efforts such as the DG SuperApp (in pilot since 2025) point in the right direction. The question now is how to translate that investment into use.

Four priorities follow. First, communicating service availability is a low-cost, high-return solution​ capable of reaching a third of current non-users. Second, because awareness alone is insufficient for older or less-educated citizens, this must be paired with targeted skills training to bridge the digital divide. Furthermore, since citizens naturally rely on local authorities for guidance, frontline village and commune officials should be formally equipped to act as proactive transaction facilitators. Finally, to support these front-end efforts, back-end upgrades to document workflows, digital signatures, and cross-ministry interoperability are necessary to enable true end-to-end online processing and the streamlining of in-person visits.

The objective is not to convert every citizen into an independent application user, but to build a state whose services work well however a citizen reaches them: on a phone, through a trusted intermediary, or across a counter made faster by the systems behind it.

Cambodia has built the digital foundations. The next phase is about bringing citizens with them.