Sustainable Cambodia: Creating the Village of the Future

Gabor Karsai is not your average businessman. Originally from Hungary, Karsai settled in New York, became a real estate agent, and joined the Rotary Club in order to stretch his philanthropic muscle. After traveling to Southeast Asia on holiday, where he witnessed the sex trade firsthand, and then reading a National Geographic article on the Thai and Cambodian sex trade, he came back to his Rotary Club with a mission.

Karsai connected next with the Gainesville, Florida, chapter of Rotary International and a group of its members who had started their own organization in Cambodia to promote sustainability in its villages. Within this group, he found Richard Allen, the co-founder of Sustainable Cambodia, an organization located in the village of Pursat in central Cambodia, which helps villages become self-sustaining communities. Karsai helped Sustainable Cambodia get a matching grant through Rotary International. He said that what drew him to this particular organization was that it was fully run by Cambodians who made a decent salary and that every time he had to communicate with someone at the non-profit in Cambodia, “I’d send an email and I’d get an email back.” In other words, he appreciated their participatory development model and knew that the matching grant was being used and organized by the very people whose lives would be enriched.

Sustainable Cambodia takes this model seriously. Nothing is “given” to the villagers, but instead, the villagers must commit their time and labor to make the projects happen. The non-Cambodian staff typically provides training and nearly all of the first-year financing for the projects, but that amount of assistance is reduced over a three-year period once the villagers become more self-reliant. At the end of the three-year period, the quality of life in the village is dramatically improved and villagers have self-created resources in order to continue improvements.

The projects from which the Village Development Committee can choose include fresh water wells (usually the top priority), irrigation, gardens, alternative agriculture, a village school, a pre-school daycare center, vocational training, micro-loans and micro-businesses, and village healthcare. When the village realized that they needed a drinkable water source as an extension of their irrigation plans, the Village Development Committee came together with the Sustainable Cambodia staff and some well drillers to decide on the locations. In order to have ownership of a well, the families have to contribute 10% of their earnings back into the well projects, then The Village Development Committee contracts with a particular family for the maintenance of each well. The cost of each well is under $900 (U.S.), serves five to eight families, and sponsors of Sustainable Cambodia can help with donations toward a village well.

Susan Mastin, the Volunteer Director/Secretary/Treasurer of Sustainable Cambodia, explained the model to me from their U.S.