PEPY Voices: Celebrating Kimline Nuch and the three years she has dedicated to PEPY

Kimline Nuch began working at PEPY as an accountant in 2008… in fact this month she is celebrating her 3-year anniversary with us! Kimline is now PEPY’s Chief Financial Officer. Her responsibilities include reviewing expenditures, monitoring program budgets, and producing monthly financial reports. In order to increase the efficiency, transparency, and accountability of the Accounting Department, Kimline and the Accounting Team have also been creating a Financial Policy Manual to refine and better document department procedures.
Kimline has had a long history of fighting for her own education. She comes from Kompong Cham Province, where she grew up in a family of 9 that had few resources available to them. At the age of 11, she and her brother supported themselves through school by picking fruit. They continued to study on their own when the rest of her family moved away due to financial pressures of the big city. Once again in Grade 10, Kimline nearly had to quit school because of school fees; however members of her community stepped up to pay the bill. She was able to continue her studies and graduate from high school due to the generosity of her friends and neighbors who believed in the power of education and Kimline’s potential.
Lacking funds for college, Kimline worked as an English and Kindergarden teacher to fund her studies beyond high school. She pursued her passion with numbers by taking classes in accounting, marketing, contract law, and computer science. After four years of work and study Kimline earned a degree in accounting.
Working with an NGO has been Kimline’s dream ever since she was young. She knew she wanted to use her business savvy to help her community and work with students. Kimline explains that as a staff member at PEPY, she is working to “help children to stay in school, learn critical thinking, leadership, and life skills, and how to improve opportunities for themselves and their communities” and that even though she doesn’t work directly with educational programs in her job, she is happy to be part of an organization that engages in community and youth work. Her motivation is rooted in her history with education: “Because of what I have overcome, I would like to encourage every single young person in Cambodia to have a high quality education. I want them to have good skills to live confident and peaceful lives.”
This month, Kimline’s long-standing commitment to business and education were recognized by Make a Difference (MaD) Asia, a forum for entrepreneurs to get together from all over Asia to share their ideas. Kimline was one of two Cambodians awarded with a subsidized trip to Hong Kong to participate in MaD Asia’s January conference, on Jan 6-8. While Kimline has traveled abroad before, this will be her first trip to Hong Kong. She’s looking forward to gaining exposure to new skills “outside of the normal box” that will help her continue to excel at her job, and bringing these ideas back to Cambodia to share with her colleagues. We congratulate Kimline on her accomplishment, and wish her all the best in her travels and professional development!