Cambodia

Single Mother Builds Her Agricultural Supply Business After Earning The Trust of Farmers

“I provide an important service to the farmers. When they encounter problems with their crops, they call me or bring me the infected plants to look at.”

Sieng Sophanna, a mother of three, increased her family's income when she opened a small shop. After enrolling in the iDE agribusiness accelerator, she boosted her skill set, which has helped her grow her business and build trust with her clients.

Cambodian children encouraged to eat nutritious foods

With funding from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, iDE rolls out global effort to improve nutritional outcomes for rural families

Despite Cambodia's economic growth, substantial progress, socio-economic and gender inequalities persist, hampering people's access to a nutritious diet, according to the World Food Programme.

Sanitation coverage radically increased across the country

The nation leads the world in reducing the rate of open defecation with household sanitation coverage as high as 88 percent in target provinces

Following a concerted effort by national and subnational governments, iDE and other partner organizations have joined forces to radically increase improved sanitation coverage and end the practice of defecating in the open.

Agricultural value chain bears fruit

How adopting a new crop helped boost incomes and climate resilience of Cambodian farmers

The World Bank says improving the performance of agricultural value chains in emerging countries like Cambodia will be crucial to ending poverty and hunger, boosting shared prosperity, and stewarding the world’s natural resources. 

Infiltrating the market with clean water

iDE’s social enterprise, Hydrologic, won the 2018 Unilever Global Development Award!

Having safe water improves the situation of women and children, who are often responsible for fetching and boiling water.

Design for humans by humans

Farmers are more likely to invest their money in a solution that comes from their own ideas, and from their true aspirations. iDE uses Human Centered Design to engage with the market to reveal those needs and desires to design solutions that people want to buy and entrepreneurs want to sell. Those solutions are more likely to be sustainable and cost-effective, too.

Entrepreneur Unleashes Latent Power Of Local Markets

Farmer uncomfortable knowing middlemen were profiting handsomely

Working as a cashew farmer in central Cambodia, In Laihout, 40, was uncomfortable with the fact that most of her crop was being exported to Vietnam where it was being processed and then on-sold by traders to bulk buyers at a significant profit.

Because there weren’t many processing centers in her low-income region, farmers like her were selling their cashews for small margins, only to see these foreign traders capitalize on their hard work and lack of local value chains.

But instead of accepting the situation, Laihout decided to start her own cashew collecting and processing business, initially working through a farmers’ association and community processing center in her village in Kampong Thom province, paying local farmers a fair price for their product and processing it herself.