Project name: Improving Income and Nutrition through Community Empowerment (INCOME III)
Romdoul is located in Svay Rieng province, Santi Sena have selected this area to be project target areas and located approximately 30–40 kilometres from the provincial town of Svay Rieng. The selected communes are being considered as poorest community within this district. These selected communes are made up of 5,040 households (22, 903 population, 11,862 females). Report 2011, Svay Teab district faced poverty and food security, there are 448 families are classified as poorest (ID Poor1) and has 1,042 families are classified in ID Poor 1 and 2, and 627 household (12.44%) facing food shortage, ranked from 3-4 months and poor 1 and 2households have been living with debt.
Agriculture Production/Productivities:
Community people living in these target communities are challenging lack of techniques of vegetable growing, animal raising, and integrated farming system development –they use traditional techniques in doing agriculture activities (raising and cultivation). Majority of households raise animals without shelter and proper caring, no vaccines, less knowledge to prevent their animals from diseases.
Water, Sanitation & Hygiene, and Nutrition:
According to report of group discussion, agricultural production has faced more challenges and failures due to the increase of epidemic diseases and insects destroying the crop. In addition, it is due to low level of understanding of health, sanitation, hygiene and nutrition. They have very limited access to proper information of climate change as well as capacity building on how to adapting to the climate change and improving the welling of household and animal. Based on report from commune council (2014) in 4 selected communes, it indicated that 26.61% (2,064) among children (7,756) has been facing malnutrition.
Traditional, Culture, and Social:
The number of woman headed households in the community (4 communes) is still high (13.37%).The issue of gender inequity and inequality is also high such as woman participation and taking leadership role, as well as decision making, domestic violence, and girls are not much encouraged for high education. 5.42% of women are illiteracy. In addition, due to lack of job opportunity in their villages, most of men migrated to work outside their community (inside the country = 12.63% and outside the country = 4.8%) leaving women heavily burden to responsible for house-hold chores and taking care of everything at home. Those included taking of children, house, home based businesses, etc. Moreover, due to the lack of understanding of safe migration, people took risk to migrate within and out of country.
Santi Sena have designed, the project name “Improving Income and Nutrition through Community Empowerment (INCOME I)” with closely working with local authorities and relevant stakeholder and funding by Heifer International Cambodia in order to improve livelihoods and food security of 1,000 vulnerable families through swine and chicken value chain. The project has 5 objectives; (1). 1,000 families represented by women, are empowered and organized, and have strong organizational capacity to move from a state of vulnerability to sustainability and resiliency, (2). 1,000 targeted families increase their income at least 100% over the baseline through enhancing their role in the respective swine and poultry value chains and other agricultural activities, (3). 1,000 families have increased production and supply of 10,000 swine and 100,000 native poultry per year in the market, (4). 1,000 families will ensure year-round available food with three meals a day of nutritious, well-balanced and diverse food items and improved sanitary practices and (5). Participating families will have adopted environmental friendly technologies. The duration of this project is 44 months, start from 2015 to June 2019.
The project has designed with Value Based Holistic Community Development (VBHCD) strategy that focused on social resource and women empowerment that the project will implement through self-help groups and will build their capacity to be able to start the value based agro-vet entrepreneurs and cooperatives in order to do larger group business and generate more income for the families. Self-help groups will start saving and credit activities for expanding their business and increasing income. Men and women project beneficiaries will be internalized the 12 value Cornerstones of Heifer in order to improve their moral and values. Passing on the Gifts: Through strengthening 12 Cornerstones, project families will be accountable and responsible in passing on physical and non-physical inputs with the same quality and value to other poor project families. Passing on the Gift is continuous activity that never ends. The project has designed with agriculture sector is focused on agricultural value chain to promoting agricultural product, the project will mainly focus on fostering swine and chicken production through in-door and out-door training (Farmer Field School), and improving animal breeds (artificial insemination) and animal feed production (feed mill at community). The project will provide animals and agricultural inputs to self-help groups as start-up capital in order to form swine-chicken enterprises and home garden. The project will link Self-Help Group members (producers) to markets and agricultural cooperatives who raise chicken or swine and other produce will be facilitated to link to markets (wholesalers-retailers).
At the project, project families have increased their income by 100% and increase their food security through enhancing the swine and chicken value chain and project families have improved their nutrition, health and sanitation with three key (1).Practises consistent use of latrine, (2).Hand-washing in critical time and (3).Drinking only safe water. Project families have adopted environmentally friendly technologies for improving the community environment and the women of project families were empowered and have strong social capital through effective and efficient application of VBHCD.