Creating Income and Livelihood Opportunities for the Rural Poor: iDE Cambodia

IDE is a non-profit International NGO with a unique market-based approach to poverty reduction.

IDE helps to build profitable enterprises and value chains that deliver sustainable social and economic benefits to the rural poor, enabling them to increase their income and improve their quality of life.

IDE has been a pioneer and innovator in market-based development since 1981 internationally, and since 1994 in Cambodia

Programs:

Overall, iDE's mission is to create income and livelihood opportunities for poor rural households. We do this by developing market-based solutions to address common obstacles faced by rural people. We strive to be pragmatic, adopting a range of strategies as required by the situation. In Cambodia, this has led to a number of exciting programs. Here's a run-down: Cambodia Agribusiness Development Facility (CADF) CADF uses a value chain approach to improve the efficiency, competitiveness, and information flow in agricultural value chains.  CADF identifies market opportunities and constraints for small-scale farmers and then designs solutions that can be implemented by local private service providers. CADF facilitates stronger value chains without becoming an ‘actor’ in the value chain itself. In its first five-year phase, the project got involved in the value chains for vegetables, fruits, pigs, mushrooms, and silk. Based on a positive evaluation by the donor, the New Zealand Aid Programme, a second three-year phase was approved in 2010, which is seeking to increase scale and impact by focusing on the vegetable and pig value chains. A further geographic expansion into Odtar Meanchey province began in 2012.

Ceramic Water Purifiers (CWPs) In 2001, iDE introduced a low-cost ceramic water filtration technology to Cambodia, setting up local manufacturing and distribution networks and stimulating demand through social marketing campaigns. More than 250,000 filters have been sold to date.  Independent research showed that CWP users experienced a 46% reduction in the incidence of diarrhea.  Each filter results in a financial gain of $145 per household due to lower mortality, less time lost to illness, and lower costs for medicine and water boiling.  The social return on investment for the donors that have invested $1.9M over the past 10 years is about 15 to 1.  In 2010, we spun off the CWP project as an autonomous social enterprise, Hydrologic, that is expected to become profitable in Q1 2013.

Farm Business Advisors (FBAs) Small-scale farmers told us they had trouble accessing quality agricultural inputs, sound technical advice, and reliable markets for their produce.  Serving this market segment has traditionally been the realm of community-based NGO projects.  In developing the FBA model, we set out to take the key features of NGO service delivery and turn it into a financially viable business model based on the fact that a little know-how and some basic technology improvements could create a lot of value on small farmers' fields.  We established a franchisor, Lors Thmey (meaning “New Growth”), that supports local entrepreneurs to become Farm Business Advisors. The FBAs support themselves by selling agricultural inputs and providing technical advice. The FBAs’ Farmer clients tend to be from the poorer households in their communities and, on average, they net about $250 per year on investments of less than $50. As of Mar 2012, the network consists of 100 FBAs serving 14,000 farmer clients.  Lors Thmey is currently operated as a separate business unit within iDE. We estimate that the franchise will be profitable at a scale of 600 FBAs.

Sanitation Marketing Since 2003, iDE has been working with local enterprises to address the untapped rural sanitation market, first in Vietnam and expanding into Cambodia.  We recently completed a project in Cambodia that resulted in 17,000 unsubsidized latrines being purchased by rural households over a 16-month period, which is a 300% increase over the baseline rate of latrine installations.  The project demonstrated that rural households, even poor households, would invest in latrines that met their aspirations and that local enterprises were willing to invest their own resources to address the burgeoning demand.  These results have generated a lot of enthusiasm among the WASH sector in Cambodia and globally.  We have secured funds for a major scale-up of the model within Cambodia and have also received funding from the World Bank, UNICEF, and others to begin planning and piloting sanitation marketing projects in Laos, East Timor, Nepal and Bangladesh, with a number of African countries in the pipeline.  We believe that this model has huge potential for global scale and impact.

Human Centered Design Many of iDE's projects have benefited from breakthrough innovations in technologies and processes.  In 2008, we worked with IDEO to adapt world-class design practice to developing world contexts, which resulted in a field guide on Human Centered Design.  We believe that there is great potential in applying "design thinking" to challenging development problems.  For this reason, we established the HCD i-Lab (Human Centered Design Innovation Lab) in Cambodia. We aim to build a critical mass of local design talent as a resource for NGOs and businesses that serve Base of the Pyramid consumers with products and services that enhance the incomes and livelihoods of rural households. http://www.ide-cambodia.org/ ◀ Back to previous post