Significant and sustainable behavioural change takes time – especially when you are working with disadvantaged and illiterate subsistence farmers. CRDT estimate that to reverse the current unsustainable trends of natural resource exploitation through sustainable agriculture takes 5 years of intensive activity before it can responsibly withdraw from a community. CRDT staff live and work in the target communities as mentors and role models.
Communities are organised into self-sustaining support structures – Community Based Organisations, and the group are trained in technical livelihood skills. CBO members are then responsible to support one another and to ensure all members are successful. But the technical details are only part of the story. CRDT also train the group in proposal-writing, financial management and leadership. Groups write a proposal to CRDT for a small grant, and then manage the budget to purchase the livestock and equipment they need. CBOs are registered with the local government and trained in advocacy. They are also trained in entrepreneurship and markets so that as a group they can get the best prices and cut out middlemen. They are trained in savings, and the group becomes a micro-credit group. No longer ‘just’ farmers, they are businesspeople, they are confident, empowered community members able to demand their rights from local government.
The below image opens a short slideshow showing the stages of project implementation. Manually click the arrows on the right/left to advance.
CRDT works with many indigenous groups, such as the Phnong in Mondulkiri or the Koy in Kratie and Stung Treng. Indigenous groups are even more reliant on natural resources than Khmers, economically marginalised and politically and socially disempowered. Many indigenous people are illiterate, speak minority languages, practice communal ownership and have different cultural values: the natural environment is often even more important to these groups.
With no connection to the government that is supposed to serve them, indigenous people and other marginalised groups like the extreme poor have no voice in the decisions with rule their lives. The CBOs that CRDT establish have an economic incentive but the results are much more wide-ranging. Groups learn how to engage with the government, have input into local planning processes, apply for government funding and open channels of discussion over controversial issues such as dams or economic concessions or land right violations. Single farmers have few tools and little power to oppose these threats – legally-registered CBOs are a legitimate channel and a force to be reckoned with at local government level.