DanChurchAid
Cambodia
Above the clouds
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DanChurchAid
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| Mr Chliey Say, Village Council Secretary, and his wife, Cambodia 2006 |
He has become very busy, the Village Council Secretary, Mr Chliey Say tells us. This is because villages have started to hand in their action plans and priorities every year. And there are both one-year plans and five-year plans. His job is to collect the plans and present them to the Village Council. Therefore, the Village Council is also very busy, he continues. But it all helps them to prioritise, he tells us.
Rights-based approaches works
One of the villages in his area is Sleng Village in the Kampong Chhnang Province in Cambodia. For the past four years, the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) has worked here using a rights-based approach . And it works.
The villages are now organised with Village Committees and they present their plans and priorities to the Village Council. Last year the Village Council discussed all the plans and decided to use the USD 3,000 they have at their disposal annually to construct a new road. On top of the list for many households was the idea to construct a dam, so that they could have more stable irrigation. However, this was too expensive for the Village Council, but they passed on the idea to the district.
Huge steps forward
The development achieved in Sleng village with a total population of around 467 people is very visible: The roads, the clinic and the expanded new school are huge steps forward. In the village there are three deep wells, 16 shallow wells and 20 household latrines. Not to mention the fish ponds, the household gardens, the Village bank and the Rice bank to help the poorest households to save rice for difficult times. The same type of progress has been seen in the other villages in the commune. “We are not yet in the sky, but we are above the clouds”, as Mr. Chliey Say expresses it.
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DanChurchAid
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| Water pumps are some of the visible improvements in Sleng village, Cambodia 2006 |
Participation of village members
All new steps forward are taken with participation of the village members and after negotiations and agreements with the local authorities.
Another improvement is that each village performs an annually self-assessment. The village people, the committee members and the local village facilitators from LWF all grade the progress of the village based on a number of criteria – capacity to improve, social and cultural life, concern for the environment, disaster preparedness, gender capacity and their ability to govern the village and advocate for their own rights. The grade is still not perfect, but there has been progress. Sleng village now has “advanced capacity” compared to “low capacity” three years ago.
A rights-based approach is not easy, but it works
David H. Mueller, Director of LWF in Cambodia , stress that a rights-based approach in Cambodia is not easy. Cambodia is still to a large extent a patron-client society, in which the patron supports the client if he wishes – and not because of the rights he or she holds, he underlines. Accountability is “going upwards”. The people are accountable to the leaders. The task is to turn this accountability structure around and make the leaders accountable to the people.
In Sleng Village it begins to work. And that is why Mr. Chliey Say and the Village Council are busy.
Written by Christian Friis Bach ( cfb@dca.dk ), International Director of DanChurchAid, who has just visited the LWF Cambodia programme .
Cambodia
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