By Barbara Rosasco | Secretary & Treasurer
From its initiation in January 1999 through the first months of the pandemic in Spring 2020, Kasumisou Foundation’s Rural Assistance Program ( RAP) has helped us to transform lives and rebuild communities to a degree that we never imagined possible when our program first started.
As the incidence of extreme poverty and hunger steadily declined among the farmers in our target villages, we expanded the program's area until our Rural Assistance Program eventually covered three districts and more than 40 villages in rural Prey Veng province, Cambodia.
The complexity of this program, its geographical remoteness from the capital city, Phnom Penh, and the fact that, unlike our other programs for which we employed our own staff, this program was started and flourished as a partnership with a local NGO (non-governmental organization) which provided the staff with local knowledge and essential expertise. Those three factors - complexity, remoteness and the use of outside staffing - made it essential, we felt, that we should personally visit the program area on a very regular basis. Our quarterly visits to the program area allowed us to review our progress against both short and medium term goals and to course correct where needed. Those visits also allowed us to get to know many of the farmers who were participating in the program and to understand better the individual challenges which each of them faced. These hands on visits also helped us to closely watch program expenditures and to deploy our resources effectively and efficiently.
Our partner organization changed and evolved over time. The staff assigned to our program rotated in and out, making the need for active involvement and very close supervision on our part even more important. Our role in actively managing the program became greater rather than declining as one might have expected as our program matured and achieved many of its benchmark goals.
The impact of the Covid pandemic and specifically the restrictions on travel have made it nearly impossible for us to exercise our formerly close involvement on the ground. These restrictions had led us to suspend the program from the earliest months of the pandemic. Now after more than two years of suspension, we have very reluctantly decided that it is time formally to close down our Rural Assistance Program.
After more than twenty years of our active participation in this program, we are so proud of what we have achieved in our efforts to improve both the natural environment and the lives and livelihoods of the farmers in rural Prey Veng province, historically one of Cambodia’s poorest provinces.
Through our partnership with you, our generous donors, we can see the transformation of both the land and the people that has taken place over the past 20 years. We will always be grateful to you for sharing this challenge with us and the success that it has achieved. Our heartfelt thanks to you all for your long time and loyal support. It has been our privilege to work with you.
We sincerely hope that you will consider shifting your support to our other programs which will continue to operate in Phnom Penh. Our AIDS Patient Family Support Program, supports fragile families impacted by HIV status and extreme poverty and our Champey Academy, brings art, dance and music instruction to disadvantaged children and youth. Additionally, Champey also provides a safe environment for fun and friendship for our students. Both of these programs are active on the GlobalGiving site.
Thank you,
Barbara & Mark
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