Cambodia on the cover of Madame Figaro: twenty years of schooling for the girls of Happy Chandara
Cambodia is front and centre in Madame Figaro. On 17 October the magazine ran a long report by Sophie Carquain on the Happy Chandara school, 15 kilometres from Phnom Penh, and on the NGO that runs it, Toutes à l'école. The association turns twenty this year.
The piece opens with Sidalis, 23. She entered Happy Chandara at 7, in uniform, with a brand-new schoolbag. She passed her baccalauréat with top honours. She now studies at the Ferrandi culinary school in Paris and did a much-noticed internship in the kitchens of the Élysée Palace. Her plan is to open a restaurant in Cambodia and teach the schoolgirls of her old school. "I want to give back to the school what it gave me," she says.
A story that began with an adoption
It all started in 2005. Tina Kieffer, a journalist, former editor-in-chief of Marie Claire and host of the television programme Frou-Frou, was travelling in Cambodia. She met Chandara, a very poor little girl, and decided to adopt her. She could not accept leaving the other children in misery. A few months later she founded the NGO. The first class entered the school on 7 November 2006.
Twenty years on, the numbers are those of a large organisation: 1,700 pupils, 2,400 meals served every day, 360 staff, most of them Cambodian. The school runs from kindergarten to high school. Two residences then house students near the universities. Girls at risk, victims of violence at home or of malnutrition, sleep at the boarding school. The others go home in the evening. Classes are taught in Khmer, English and French.
Science and soil
The school steers girls towards scientific fields. A quarter of those who pass the baccalauréat choose that path. Some leave the country for the Mines engineering school, other engineering schools or culinary arts. Tina Kieffer pushes agronomy in particular, so that these young women can later look after their families' land.
Ecology is part of Happy Chandara's identity. In the early years, the founder saw girls arriving with decayed teeth and patches of eczema, reactions to pesticides used without regulation in the country. She opened a medical and social centre, then launched an agroecology programme. The campus has been planted with greenery, which lowered the temperature by three to four degrees. The school grows 30 tonnes of organic fruit and vegetables a year to feed its pupils. Planting lessons begin in kindergarten. The girls also make organic soap for the community and collect plastic waste.
Most teachers are Khmer. They are backed by volunteer students from Centrale, Polytechnique or AgroParisTech, who stay six months or more. Margot Solari, who studied at both Centrale Paris and AgroParisTech, taught coding to the teachers and prepared the final-year students for competitive exams. She also worked on a home automation project that brought scholarships to the school.
Sponsorship pays the bills
The whole economy of Happy Chandara rests on its sponsors, Tina Kieffer says. Sponsoring a girl costs 39 euros a month, or 13 euros after the French tax deduction. It puts 100 little girls in school each year. Sponsors receive news of their girl, and some come to meet her during a trip to Cambodia.
Two familiar faces of French television are among the sponsors. Anne-Claire Coudray, anchor of TF1's evening news, has been one for twelve years. She edited the very first television report on the school, back when Claire Chazal was the association's patron. She cites a 100% pass rate at the baccalauréat. Agathe Lecaron, of France 2's morning show Télématin, has sponsored Srey Ney for a year. The girl was born in 2020 and has just started primary school. Lecaron points out that many Cambodian girls suffer sexual violence within their own families, and that schooling puts a healthy distance between them and their abusers.
Rebuilding schools after the Khmer Rouge
Madame Figaro sets the story in its historical context. On 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. Teachers and intellectuals were persecuted and schools destroyed. Being able to read or speak a foreign language became suspect. The magazine puts the death toll at close to two million between 1975 and 1979. After the regime fell in January 1979, the country had to rebuild its school system, and with it trust in knowledge.
For the next twenty years, Tina Kieffer wants to recruit more sponsors, so that she no longer has to raise funds, and to open schools in other emerging countries. Information and sponsorship: toutesalecole.org.
Source: Madame Figaro, 17 October 2026, "Au Cambodge, cette école fondée par Tina Kieffer change la vie de milliers de jeunes filles", by Sophie Carquain.
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