Celebrating our new and local partnerships in Cambodia - a further step in our commitment to disability inclusion.
Celebrating our new and local partnerships in Cambodia - a further step in our commitment to disability inclusion.
In Cambodia, only half of people with disabilities are formally employed (52.9%), poverty rates amongst people with disabilities in Cambodia are 4-6% higher than for people without disabilities, and households which include member(s) with disabilities incur an average extra expenditure of USD 40 per month. The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a loss of income and livelihoods in Cambodia, with the greatest impact on those already living in poverty, including people with disabilities who are disproportionately represented in this group.
The financial inclusion of this group is therefore crucial, and Good Return's four new local partners - which are organisations of people with disabilities (OPDs) - are uniquely placed to ensure we can improve the livelihoods of those living with disabilities. Our new partners are: Women and Children Disabled Persons Forum Kampong Cham (WCDFK), Phnom Penh Center for Independent Living (PPCIL), Association Music for People with Disabilities (AMPD) and Samrong Tong Disabled Persons Federation (SRTF). For the team at Good Return, these partnerships are something to celebrate - as they represent our wider commitments to both disability inclusion and a longer term process of localisation.
We are working with these new partners alongside our longstanding partner Chamroeun Microfinance Plc. to deliver our CAFE (Consumer Awareness and Financial Empowerment) Initiative. The CAFE Initiative is an innovative financial education program for people in disadvantaged communities. Focused on behavioural change, CAFE helps learners make good financial choices so they can plan for the future and take control of their money.
Adapting our programs with our new partners:
Since forming these new partnerships the Cambodia CAFE team has already gone from strength to strength under the wider ‘Education and Access: Responsible Inclusive Finance for People with Disabilities' project.
The CAFE program has been adapted to ensure that the materials and delivery are inclusive for people living with disabilities. For example, in November 2022, our team visited our CAFE financial capability coaches from Women and Children with Disability Forum Kampong Cham. These coaches were originally trained by Good Return staff and now teach others in their community about money management, planning for the future and unexpected events in their households and business. Even though some participants had visual and hearing impairments, they actively participated in the session using sign language and support from their coaches. Similarly, when working with the Association Music for People with Disabilities, the program has been enhanced to include blind and visually impaired people as coaches and learners.
Our team also believes that continued and on-going support for these coaches is key. The team has now trained 8 representatives from these OPDs as coaches to deliver the CAFE coaching program to their members, in addition to a further 8 staff from Chamroeun Microfinance. In February this year, our team conducted ‘refresher’ training with CAFE coaches from the four OPDs, alongside partner Chamroeun. So far, through this project, more than 1,500 people have now completed the CAFE coaching program, the vast majority of whom have some disability, and around half of whom have severe disabilities.
Wider impacts:
It is clear that the program is also having a wider impact beyond just the participants of the program. Coaches both with and without disabilities are also learning from each other by participating together in this training. Coach Sambath Lyheng, from Chamroeun Microfinance Plc (CMP), explained that: ‘Through this 2-day refresher training, I got more than I expected in joining participants with disabilities. I am inspired to train more people with severe disabilities, including visual impairment and hearing and speaking difficulties upon my return’.
By working with local partners and within existing institutions the team is striving to have a wider, systematic impact. That is, the program first aims to adapt and become inclusive for people with disabilities, but it is also about mainstreaming disability inclusion into everyday financial practices and systems to make them inclusive for all. Alison Thornburn, Good Return’s Social Impact Officer explains that the program is ‘enabling both the coaches and the learners from OPDs to develop new skills and build their confidence, and by doing so is also strengthening their organisations as a whole’.
Adapting the loan program:
In addition to adapting the CAFE program, our partner Chamroeun has also developed a pilot loan product tailored to the needs of people with disabilities. So far, 172 clients have taken up this opportunity to pursue business activities and fulfil their entrepreneurial ambitions.
One client of this adapted loan product was Ven Ratana, who wanted to build his business manufacturing and delivering dishwashing liquid. Ratana, who had polio as a child, was recruited from Phnom Penh Centre for Independent Living and trained as a CAFE coach so that he could teach money management skills to other members of his community. Ratana used this experience to help with his business planning, and then took a tailored loan to buy a tuk tuk to increase the amount of deliveries he could make. Reflecting on his experience, he said: ‘I would like to see more people with disabilities get access to a tailored loan like I did, so they can make their business plans happen’.
Watch Ratana’s story now in this video.
Why does Good Return commit to disability inclusion?
Adapting our programs to ensure that they are inclusive for people living with disabilities (PLWD) is a core principle at Good Return. While people with disabilities make up 15% of the population worldwide, they are commonly excluded from economic life, leaving them more likely to live in poverty. As people with disabilities struggle to obtain and maintain employment, they often turn to self-employment, yet they face significant barriers to accessing the capital necessary to turn these entrepreneurial activities into sustainable incomes. This contributes to higher rates of poverty experienced by people with disabilities, creating further barriers to accessing services to enable their full participation in society.Therefore, as Uk Phaikdey Good Return’s CAFE Coordinator for Cambodia and Disability Focal Point, explains: ‘Developing the capacity of people with disabilities to actively seek and use responsible financial services has the potential to catalyse entrepreneurship and break the existing cycle between disability, poverty and disadvantage’.
Why does Good Return commit to working with local partners?
At Good Return, we work within national financial ecosystems through a whole of systems approach that supports sustainable financial inclusion. We do this because we believe that local partners and institutions better respond to the needs of the communities in which they already work to offer customised financial products. We work to improve the social performance of existing financial service providers, rather than creating external initiatives outside the national financial system.
Moving forward
As we continue to focus on disability inclusion in our programs, we believe that it will take a wide range of committed stakeholders to enact the change that is needed to effectively bring people with disabilities into the economy. This will include working with local partners in addition to fundamental policy shifts that strive to #leavenoonebehind. Consequently, Good Return welcomed the news in November 2022 from the Minister for International Development and the Pacific, Pat Conroy, that work has begun on a new disability inclusion and rights strategy to sit across Australia’s development program. We await the new Australian international development policy - set to be announced in the coming months.
Closer to home, we look forward to learning more from our new local partners and believe we should centre the voices of people with disabilities in this journey: #nothingaboutuswithoutus. We have been inspired by the determination of the coaches from these OPDs, who are also people with disabilities themselves, to support their own communities in advocating for financial capability and social inclusion.
Thank you to the Good Return Team in Cambodia UK Phaikdey, Pol Maneth, Lim Arunremfa, Tou Chandara and Alison Thornburn for continuing Good Return’s commitment to disability inclusion.
Good Return’s CAFE Initiative is delivered in partnership with the Australian Government through the
Australian NGO Cooperation Program (ANCP) and with support from the Accenture Australia Foundation.
#ANCP.