“I didn’t know until I joined the workshop with CFI…”

In the past four months, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected many people around the world. Many in Cambodia are struggling to make a living during this time.

In Cambodia, the situation is getting better. But schools are still closed, crowded places are not open and many employees are working remotely. There are also a large number of people that relied on visitors and tourists who are now unemployed.

Additionally, people who migrated to work in other countries like Malaysia and Thailand came back home because they couldn’t make the income to support their family during the lockdown, or governments asked them to leave. When they first got home, the family situation was even more difficult because there were more mouths to feed and they’re unemployed so could not contribute.

CFI has been collaborating with Khorb Commune Chief to help families who migrated, return back from Thailand. For these initial 27 families, we offered them emergency rice and grocery support for the next three months and an opportunity for a small start-up business like raising chickens, growing vegetables, and small grocery shops in their community.

So far 20 families are interested in creating a small business. It is great to see families want to help themselves more than depending on us.

Besides the rice support and start-up small business, we also provide a workshop every month before we provide the rice support. For the first month, we covered safe migration. Families loved and engaged with the workshop and we got a lot of great feedback from families through the survey.

One person told us “I didn’t know until I joined the workshop with CFI that migration to work in another country can cause so many problems for my family. ”

And for the next two months, we will provide workshops about COVID-19, how to keep their family safe, including where to get help if they get COVID-19. And we will also provide a workshop about how to start up a small business in the community that can support their family. Hopefully, these families will have less need to migrate to work in other countries again, therefore keeping children safe.

We hope to expand this support to reach more families in the coming months.

A big thank you to South-East Asia Foundation and BASAID for making this possible.