Round-up for the last two weeks

• In Singapore, we've been moving and changing things around and in Cambodia, it's been Khmer New Year when Phnom Penh empties as everybody goes to visit their families.
  
  
• Most of our staff took leave to extend KNY and we had staff on stand-by for the few kids who still needed boarding and help, but things were mostly peaceful and quiet for a change!
  
  
• Women On A Mission came up from Singapore to give the kindergarten children a day of fun and made a generous donation. We were able to get all the kids a new (well mostly - second-hand but clean and presentable!) clothes for Khmer New Year.
  
  
• Inflation has hit us hard with rising food costs. The hardest has been the burden on staff. Everyone in Phnom Penh is struggling on salaries that were decent last year and now barely make ends meet. In June, we're scheduled to do a cost-of-living increase and Riverkids' pay policy is to pay exactly in the middle of the range of NGO salaries. We make up for working in difficult and unpopular neighbourhoods with decent health insurance and a really supportive work environment, but keeping good staff is a huge challenge still. We've just lost two great staff to much better paying jobs, in part from the skills and experience they picked up with us.
  
  
• Thanks Elaine Meyers too! You've been a great supporter.
  
  
• We were wonderfully surprised with an unexpected gift of a hundred backpacks full of school materials and stationary. Thanks, Jane and friends - enough for all our grade schoolers at Alexandra and Blum! The next challenge is getting them up from Singapore to Phnom Penh. If you're travelling there, please let us know! We appreciate every spare kilo of luggage.
  
  
• We can't get registered with the Singapore government as a local charity because we would have to commit to spending at least 80% of our income, including international donations, in Singapore or to help Singaporeans. This has been a big blow as we lost as significant grant opportunity because we can't offer tax deductability locally (only in Cambodia! Cambodian corporations, call us!). We're now following up on registering with the EDB or as a society, but it's not at all straightforward. The only cheerful part was that the week of the meeting with NCSS, a local paper reported that one of the biggest local foundations, Temasak Foundation, has the same registration problem because they mainly work in the region too.

Local NGO registration

We originally thought the best way to do this would be as an International NGO, but we will probably be going as a local Cambodian NGO (Mekong Riverkids Foundation) that is directly funded by the Singapore trust, Riverkids Project.

In Cambodia, NGOs go in three different ways. If you're small enough like we are/were, you don't much need anything, but it is way better to be formally registered because then you can deal directly with police, grants etc. First, you can umbrella under an existing NGO as a single project. You write a memorandum of understanding (MOU) and get that signed off by the right ministry - a health clinic under the Ministry of Health, for example. Then you can apply for a local NGO which is Ministry of Internal Affairs and the appropriate ministry for your project. Riverkids is likely to go under MOSALVY (Ministry of Social Affairs, Labour, Vocational Training and Youth Rehabilitation) and you have to have a board and checked accounts and so on. An International NGO does the same, but through Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and you need paperwork from the other country to show you're a registered charity.

There are pros and cons to each one, and it's also a question of cost. Registration has some mandated and some not-so-mandated fees, and there's complying with the legal requirements, which we're good with, and also setting ourselves up internally to exceed them, and well.

It basically means a lot of phone calls and paperwork and is intensely boring but necessary.

ETA: And we are basically done for this! I'm picking up final paperwork this trip, and everything's been filed. We're going to be Riverkids Foundation in Cambodia, as Project apparently doesn't sound official enough in Cambodia.