This month we have started working with some of the Riverkids parents. Not being able to support one's own family is damaging to the self-esteem. Sometimes when someone's self esteem is very low, that person has trouble caring about themselves enough to make positive decisions. Such is the case of many in our community. We hope to help a bit by giving some of our parents some simple skills and projects to create income for their family. The parents are in charge of documenting their hours worked and product and cost so they also learn some basic business skills. So far we trained 9 parents for a flower making project. 6 are continuing to make flowers. We will be able to give 10 more interested parents the opportunity to start creating next week.
The projects are small, but are a start towards independence. All the parents are getting paid fair wages.
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Plans have been made and just need to be set in motion for the next step of the get ready girls program. 2 of the students are able to continue their education at a private school. One of these will be working part time as a Kindergarten assistant because she wants to eventually study to be a teacher. Some girls will go to apprenticeships in tailoring, hair dressing, house keeping, child care, cooking, and retail. Others will be taking office, admin, and English classes. I am excited to see the first group of Get Ready Girls start working. I think it will have a tremendous affect on the community, strengthening the trust of the Riverkids families in us.
For money right now, the Get Ready girls are working on Christmas decorations which will be sold online at the Riverkids store and at Bloom. The girls receive fair wa
ges for their work plus the proceeds of course go back to Riverkids. There should be some beautiful product available in a month or so check it out!
www.bloomcambodia.com or if in
2 comments:
For parents who would like to start their own small businesses to support their family, perhaps Riverkids could direct them to one of the many microfinance ngos in Cambodia.
The 'give a fish or teach them to fish', totally agreeing, but for most of our families, they're not ready for a loan. Lending them a small sum for a business is more than money - they need to have an idea of the business they want to do, the discipline to do it, the skills and the support. Most of our families don't have that. Cambodia has some great microfinance NGOs, but we need to bridge the gap first. Otherwise, they will end upd efaulting on the loans, getting discouraged and dropping even further behind. At the Alexandra site, we're now actively looking to hire a Family Business co-ordinator, someone who will work on job placement and business skills and microfinance because there are a couple of families and individuals who we think will soon be ready. Oh - and one thing we may do is micro-micro (nano? *g*) funding. The microfinance banks won't go under $100 usually, and that requires some kind of asset, so for homeless or renting families who need $50 for a medical bill, they go to the local moneylenders who charge 50-200% interest rate. The local moneylenders don't want the business much (we checked in case we disrupted the local economy inadvertantly) and this is something we've done ad-hoc already, with people repaying small emergency loans through labour. So we might set up a way to do nano-funding. It's interesting how different the eocnomics of slum living are from 'standard' living - equally as complex!
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