Be the Change Network

Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Sorry for the long silence, everyone. One of our computers crashed, I contracted an upper respiratory infection, and my kids, having been pretty much ignored for a month, finally cracked and demanded my attention. So we took a much-needed break. But that’s not to say we rested. Here’s a recap of the past week:

We left Chrauk Tiek with our team of 9 and a small box of briquettes and traveled back down the long, bumpy road to the coastal town of Kampong Som (Sihanookville). Along the way we stopped at restaurants and vendors to test-market our product. It was not difficult. The demand for cooking fuel is extremely high, and the 3 traditional options – wood sticks, charcoal, and gas - are either skyrocketing in price or limited in supply. As a result, people are surprisingly open to new ideas. Once the briquette is demonstrated and they see how well it burns with little smoke, we get immediate orders for more. We hoped for a 10% response to our marketing effort, and we got a 90% response. Although logic tells us this is a good thing, that is not always the case. The next challenge that faces us is keeping our customers supplied. The problem is not selling them, it is producing enough and getting them to market in a timely manner. This issue sent us back to the drawing board. We discussed production levels, transportation and marketing. At capacity, the 7 presses at our school operated by 19 workers can produce about a ton of briquettes a week, and once the expenses of labor and transportation are paid, we should have about $180 profit to donate back to the school. That is enough to give 7 teachers a $20/month raise and pay for the fuel to pump water and clean the bathroom. A committee of school supporters will need to decide cooperatively how the money we earn should be spent to strengthen the education in their community.

We created a bi-lingual marketing brochure, and chose the name Smart Choice Fuel Briquettes for our brand because the English metaphor “School Fuel? doesn’t make sense in Khmer. For fundraising purposes in our English speaking donor community, we’ll call it our School Fuel Program which teaches people how to make Smart Choice Fuel Briquettes. And the point of making them is to economically empower a community to support their own school. This product makes more sense than implementing a handicraft project where the market would be very far away indeed, or an agricultural project where the labor and time involved don’t produce an immediate return. Everyone uses cooking fuel on a daily basis and since briquettes are made from waste material, the raw material is essentially free. The demand is high, the market is close, and the skill is easy compared to other economic development options. As the news of the new idea spreads, more villagers have been showing up at the school daily to ask how they can take the training and buy a press. We may have another income-generating opportunity in the production and selling of briquette presses for those who wish to start the small business at home.

Realistically, the transportation expense down the long bumpy road is the biggest obstacle we face. It is humbling to learn firsthand how difficult it is to access the marketplace in this context. No wonder the rural areas cannot develop! Ideally, the briquettes produced at our school should be consumed locally. But the majority of people living in Chrauk Tiek are so focused on consuming the forest resources that it is going to take some reverse psychology to get their behavior to change. If the city marketplace deems the briquette product valuable, the people living in Chrauk Tiek will too. If people use them locally and we reduce transportation cost, more profit can be pumped back into their school. But these ideas must be learned step-by-step. And the reality is, if we create the demand in the city marketplace, and we don’t step up to the plate to meet that demand, someone else will. So we have been thinking about how to expand this training to other schools that are closer to the city.

We hired Savin Oeun, one of our translators with a bachelor’s degree in rural development, to spend the next month creating the Briquette Training Program so we will have an additional product to sell – our knowledge. We have had several requests from other NGOs to bring our training to their schools as a result of the report about our activities on Radio Free Asia. By selling the training program to other schools, working with community leaders to implement efficiently and effectively (learning from our own mistakes first, of course), and developing a marketing association around Smart Choice Fuel, we can envision a way to increase production, reduce forest destruction, and support schools on a much wider scale. And we’ll be generating more income for our school at the same time. Sounds like a beautiful solution, doesn’t it? Of course, changing behavior is not quite that simple. It remains to be seen if our Cambodian team can soldier forth independently, learn from their mistakes, build solidarity and grasp the opportunity to empower themselves.

I am humbled to realize just how difficult it is to empower people. It is easy to give people a fish. It is much harder to teach them to fish. In Cambodia, a culture completely distorted by the trauma of war, people have become used to waiting for handouts from donors - and it isn’t good. They’ve lost their initiative. From the top officials in the government right down to the village level, people expect money from donors to fall into their hands, or as my new Country Director Yoen says “they only want the food put directly in their mouths.? When you realize the psychology you’re up against, it can all get a bit depressing.

I take comfort in looking at people individually, seeing how we win them over one by one. Mr. Leng, who is HIV-positive, unemployed and completely dependent of rice handouts from Lutheran World Service, became our very best worker and he will soon become a trainer. Tau Soka, who wrote the first letter to stop the forest destruction and convinced her husband to stop taking bribes as a policeman, will now be making briquettes with a baby on her back. Sok Sarit used to be a woodcutter; now he is a fruit tree farmer, an avid school supporter and assistant manager of our briquette facility. I think of Sokea, a girl with tight curly hair who plays the Ta Kay beautifully and sits with her eight girlfriends in the front row of 6th grade, eager to learn everything we can teach. Will she get to secondary school? And if she does, will the teachers show up? There is no high school for her to attend. These problems are much more than one donor can solve, we must empower the community if there is to be real and lasting change. We must not make Sokea a beggar.

For the lessons we’ve learned, we see a valuable opportunity at hand, the only thing stopping us is capitol. When we return home we’ll be looking for board members and BIG fundraising ideas. Please contact us if you are interested. Our family leaves for the US tomorrow night. Now, I’m off to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to register our NGO…. I hear I have to “donate? a ton of rice…..