By Daniel Pacheco | Project Leader
Thank you all again for your contributions, and helping us become permanent members of Global Giving. While we continue to fundraise in order to reach our goal, we are working very hard to get all the logistics ready for when the funding goes through. We have been working with Live&Learn to identify a suitable village and potential micro-entrepreneurs within the village, who we will train to sell and service the solar lighting kits.
For the first project we have selected the Phat Sanday Commune in Kampong Thom Province. Phat Sanday Comune is composed of 5 floating villages. Floating villages tend to be some of the poorest communities in Cambodia. Since they cannot afford land, they resort to building houses on the river, either on top of fishing boats, or on makeshift rafts. Live&Learn has been working on these villages for several years helping them improve their sanitation and access to clean water. Now we have partnered with them to bring them access to electricity. With the funding we receive through global giving we will sponsor lighting kits for 50 households in these villages.
But we do not believe that handouts alone are enough to break the poverty cycle. With that in mind we will offer free workshops open to the entire community and technical and business training to potential micro-entrepreneurs that are being identified by Live&Learn. They have already identified 2, one of them being the school teacher. We will set up these micro-entrepreneurs with kits,bags, marketing, accounting, and promotional materials. This will allow them to increase their income even by working a few hours a day selling/servicing the solar lighting kits. For more information on our micro-entrepreneur model please download our concept-paper here.
Next Steps:
- Instead of waiting until we have reached the goal, we want to make sure we can benefit as many families as we can, as soon as possible! As soon as the current funding goes through, we will order as much of the equipment as we can in order to get things moving. If necessary, the kits will be installed in different stages, depending on the timeframe of the funding coming through.
- We are arranging a few preliminary visits, through Live&Learn, in order to meet village leaders and potential entrepreneurs. We will do some workshops and training as well. We are hoping to arrange the first of these visits by the early February and will post an update with pictures as soon as this happens.
-Finally, continue our fundraising efforts! We already have several other projects in mind so we are looking forward to successfully implementing this one in order to bring the benefits of lighting to as many households as possible.
If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or concerns, please get in touch with us!
Links:
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