As damage from last year’s floods continues to threaten hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, one aid agency is asking villagers to design their own rehabilitation plans as a way to empower rural Cambodians and better prepare for future disasters.
The test program, set up by CARE International, means to train village leaders and disaster preparedness personnel to return to villages and figure out what they need to recover from the flooding. Some villages need wells repaired. Others need a new bridge. Some ask for bean seeds or water pumps. The villagers rank their needs, consider their budget and report back to CARE—a slightly different approach to relief efforts.
“I don’t know if it has been done before,” said Neil Hawkins, CARE’s country director. Having villagers come up with a plan also helps agencies prevent overlapping their aid efforts, he said.
The program is in place in seven provinces, with $7,000 budgeted for each. Though the program began in early December, the first “action plans” are just now coming in. The first arrived from Pursat province’s Kandieng district, where four villages were chosen.
The program is designed to immediately “meet the demands on the ground,” Hawkins said, but also to empower Cambodians, “and that can only be a good thing.”
The whole village becomes involved, he said. “We shouldn’t be in the driving seat,” he said. “This is a Cambodian issue; they have to solve it.”
Sustained rain and flooding pummeled many parts of the country from July to September last year, devastating thousands of farmers’ rice crops, washing away roads and contaminating wells. A state of emergency was declared in 14 of the country’s 23 provinces.
The flooding will likely cause already poor villagers and farmers more problems as their food supplies and assets are depleted in the upcoming months.
Relief efforts for the flooding are still being evaluated by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Society, said Seija Tyrninoksa, the country’s delegation head. In general, response was “surprisingly good,” but “there are still a lot of short-comings,” she said. For example, the country needs more information-sharing mechanisms in place, she said.
Villagers were already very involved in the process, she said. More attention to village-level participation like CARE’s project will be helpful not only for rehabilitation, but also for preparedness—two important stages for disaster relief, Tyrninoksa said.
One of the main obstacles for bottom-up approaches, however, is the number of villages, according to Peter Guest of the UN’s World Food Program.
Nevertheless, the trend in development is moving toward similar “micro-projects,” he said. Projects at the village and commune levels take a lot of time to set up, he said.
Villagers in Pursat have begun their rehabilitation projects with encouraging results, said Claire Sanford, a monitor for CARE who returned from Kandieng district last week.
“Row upon row of fields with seed in them,” water pumps humming, and enthusiastic workers were all signs that the program could work if implemented country-wide, she said.
The pilot project is being funded by the European Commission Humanitarian Office with $80,000.
This year’s flooding made a lot of people aware of the need for good disaster preparedness, exposing a preparedness plan the “was on paper only,” said Gian Luigi Schiavo, head of the ECHO. Relief supplies were too few, and distribution difficult, he said. The EC gave money to CARE, he said, because the program is expected to strengthen preparedness, thereby lessening the cost of relief, he said.
Rains and flooding that began as far back as June last year reportedly killed at least 347 people and caused $157 million in physical damages to rice crops, dikes, schools and chattel, according to a report from the Cambodia Development Resource Institute. Rural families now face increased indebtedness, loss of animals and other assets, and a food shortage.
Rice fields, wells, roads, bridges and other structures damaged by the floods will need to be fixed or replaced, and rural Cambodians are will face a severe rice shortage in the upcoming months.
Nearly 400,000 households saw their rice cultivation “completely destroyed by the flood,” the Institute reported in its recent quarterly report. “The total damage to the rice sector is over $87 million,” it stated.
CARE’s pilot program will not help all of the villages assaulted by the water that rose high enough to sweep away houses, livestock and a life’s savings for some. But some good is bound to come from the relief efforts, Schiavo said. “We know what we lack for next year,” he said. At least everyone’s role in flood relief will be clearer, he said, and “responsibility better established.”
