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Cambodia
iDE has been growing prosperity in Cambodia since 1994 by building value chains and business models in agriculture, clean water, and sanitation that promote beneficial, affordable products and services.
Innovative program focuses on increasing profits for small-scale farmers
Tork Noeurt made a living working as a laborer across the border in Thailand. Like many Cambodians, he and his wife Vorn Loeurm would leave their children with relatives while they traveled back and forward.
But when COVID-19 broke out and the border was closed, the 37-year-old father of two was forced to look for another way to earn a living and provide for his family.
Out of Cambodia’s population of 15 million people, nearly 3 million are classified as poor and as many as 8 million others teeter just above the poverty line. One bad crop or one expensive illness will pull them back under. About 90 percent of the poor live in rural areas where farming is difficult because of increasingly unreliable rainfall, water scarcity, poor infrastructure, weak institutions, and poor market linkages. More than half the rural population is still without a toilet.
What we do—
Resilient Market Ecosystems
For developing world entrepreneurs to succeed they must participate in market ecosystems that are economically competitive, inclusive of all people, and resilient to shocks such as conflict or changing climates. By listening to every stakeholder—producers, suppliers, retailers and customers—we can overcome critical bottlenecks and develop lasting solutions.
Building momentum toward open defecation free status in Cambodia
iDE is expanding sanitation coverage to everyone in Cambodia through an innovative program that makes toilets attractive and affordable to all people, including the rural poor.
iDE improves rural livelihoods and resilience by strengthening value chains for agricultural products, primarily in rice, vegetables, quick-maturity fruits, and pigs. iDE's Cambodia Agribusiness Development Facility (CADF) identifies market opportunities and constraints for small-scale farmers and then designs solutions that are implemented by local private service providers.
We have also established Lors Thmey, a social enterprise that recruits and trains local entrepreneurs to become Farm Business Advisors, who serve their local communities by selling agricultural products and services. By improving access to technical assistance, market information, quality inputs, and new technologies, iDE enables small-scale farmers to participate more effectively in markets and reap substantial benefits.
iDE develops efficient and scalable approaches that enable rural households to purchase and use sanitary latrines. Our strategy is to remove as many barriers to latrine purchase as possible. iDE introduces product innovations, creates demand through village meetings, and strengthens the ability of rural businesses to produce and install affordable, attractive latrines. Our social enterprise, Hydrologic, sells aspirational, safe drinking-water solutions to rural households. And iDE applied Human Centered Design to develop an effective water-soap-sink device integrated with latrines, to encourage handwashing after defecation.
Cambodia is ranked as one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change. Climate scientists predict hotter, drier dry seasons, shorter wet seasons with more intense rainstorms, and less overall predictability. With 80 percent of the population relying on rural agriculture, these climate change effects have a severe impact on many people.
iDE researches farming strategies that increase rural people’s resilience to climate variability and extreme weather. iDE helps farmers to spread their risk by growing more diverse crops in shorter cycles with water-saving technologies and climate-smart agricultural practices.
In Cambodia’s hierarchical society, women experience cultural barriers to accessing quality training, new technology, and government services. Women also face disparities in workload, decision-making power, and control over income and expenditures.
Focusing on women as customers and entrepreneurs, iDE strengthens their participation in rural value chains by increasing their access to technology, know-how, finance, and markets. Success in commercial farming also increases women’s self-confidence and standing in the community.
More than one in three Cambodian children under five are stunted, with approximately 45 percent of all child deaths attributed to malnutrition.
By promoting high-value, nutritious crops, iDE empowers farmers to earn more income and provide their families and communities with a more varied diet, improves access to safe water and sanitation, and helps people to avoid the gut diseases that prevent them from absorbing the nutrients gained from an improved diet. Better nutrition provides the fuel for families to move out of poverty today and ensures that the next generation reaches its full developmental potential.
Farmers are more likely to invest their money in a solution that comes from their own ideas, and from their true aspirations. iDE uses Human Centered Design to engage with the market to reveal those needs and desires to design solutions that people want to buy and entrepreneurs want to sell. Those solutions are more likely to be sustainable and cost-effective, too.
Farmer uncomfortable knowing middlemen were profiting handsomely
Working as a cashew farmer in central Cambodia, In Laihout, 40, was uncomfortable with the fact that most of her crop was being exported to Vietnam where it was being processed and then on-sold by traders to bulk buyers at a significant profit.
Because there weren’t many processing centers in her low-income region, farmers like her were selling their cashews for small margins, only to see these foreign traders capitalize on their hard work and lack of local value chains.
But instead of accepting the situation, Laihout decided to start her own cashew collecting and processing business, initially working through a farmers’ association and community processing center in her village in Kampong Thom province, paying local farmers a fair price for their product and processing it herself.
Join the Activators Circle, iDE’s monthly sustaining donor program, to activate entrepreneurs around the world to increase their incomes and improve the lives of their families.
