Provide women and girls education in Cambodia

Dear Friend,

We hope this finds you well. We wanted to send you an update on our progress since our last report in August.

We have been very lucky that Cambodia currently has no community transmission of COVID19, however people are still being cautious and implementing safety and hygiene measures to stay protected. For Cambodia the devastation has come in terms of the ecconomy, with unemployment and poverty now at high levels. We are still working hard to support our local community and are giving out food and hygiene supplies, plus seeds and chicks for long term sustainability. When people come to the center for supplies we are able to run socially distanced workshops for small numbers, but in the main our workshops have gone online. 

We are still providing counselling and referal services for those who need it, especially women who are suffering from domestic violence or mental health problems at this time.

In October we celebrated the International Day of the Girl and instead of an in person workshops, talks and activities we took oursleves online and conducted our first facebook live session - which was a great success!

Each month we have also been honoured to be on the radio to share more about womens issues and give women more exposure here in Cambodia,

In addition we have continued to invest in our staff and community ambassadors with training as we know how important it is to keep skills aliive and to coninue to learn new ones. 

Despite the challenges of 2020 we are working hard to support the women of Siem Reap in new and innovative ways and thank you for your support!

Best wishes,

Gemma and the WRC team

Links:

• WRC website

Thank you for supporting WRC and investing in the education and life skills of Cambodian women!

As you know, our workshops are usually run in person in our centre, schools and in the community. Due to COVID19, since February when the schools closed and March when our centre closed, we have not been able to deliver in person workshops to keep participants and staff safe. Over the last few months, we have been working hard behind the scenes to find the best ways to reach the women and girls we support with our workshops. There has been some capacity building for staff, investing in new platforms and technology, and work withing the community to ensure our beneficiaries could access online platforms and receive the information we have to share. We are delighted to report that we recently ran our first online workshop via zoom on ‘Women’s Health – Menstruation and Hygiene’ to 24 young adults and ‘Positive Parenting’ to 11 parents. We have also produced a Positive Parenting manual for distribution in August.  In addition, we have filmed a financial literacy video and shared this online (via youtube and facebook) for women to understand more about controlling their finances at this tricky time. We have lots more planned and will keep you updated!

You may also be interested to know that during COVID 19 we have been providing counselling to women and their families via the phone, in the last few weeks alone the team received 30 new cases and supported 22 women with ongoing issues. Most of these client’s concerns are around having no food, domestic violence (which has increased 300%) and financial issues – especially for those with debts and no income. We have also been supplying 50-100  families a month with emergency food an hygiene packages and additional support depending on their needs.

Thank you for your gift to WRC – we could not have achieved so much, and supported so many community members now and into the future without you!

Best wishes,

Gemma and the WRC team.

Links:

• Annual Reports
• WRC website
• WRC facebook page