Girls be Ambitious
An Ounce of Prevention: Eradicating Trafficking of
Girls in Cambodia
Trafficking of girls and women is one of the
most serious human rights problems facing Cambodia today. In
a country where the per capita income is one of the lowest in
the world, and state support systems are negligible, unsuspecting
victims are lured with false promises of jobs then forced into
sex work or exploitative labor situations. Victims are controlled
with threats, lies, drugs, physical force and often held in
slave-like conditions. The objective of Japan Relief for Cambodia/American
Assistance for Cambodia's (JRfC/AAfC) Girls be Ambitious program
is to prevent the trafficking of Cambodian girls and women for
sexual and labor exploitation through an incentive program for
girls from poverty-stricken homes to stay in school and receive
additional vocational training that will provide employment
alternatives, income generation and social and political empowerment.
Among victims of trafficking, the group who
are most vulnerable are illiterate girls who are enticed to
migration and who are exploited en route and at their destination.
Our program aims to improve awareness among these women at risk
by providing them with alternatives close to home and ways to
improve their livelihoods.
 |
|
School children standing in front of
their new five-room school, The Wakako Hironaka School
in Robieb village, Preah Vihear Province. |
The Girls be Ambitious program will run off
of JRfC/AAFC's Cambodian School Project which currently manages
310 elementary and middle schools in rural villages (www.cambodiaschools.com).
The Cambodia School Project, launched in 1999 through funding
from private sectors and matching funds from the World Bank
and the Asian Development Bank, is a school-building program
in rural Cambodia in cooperation with the Cambodian Ministry
of Education. The curriculum follows the Ministry of Education
program but many of our schools have added "value"
such as internet connection, computer and English-language training
and a farming program. We are currently equipped with satellite
dishes that provide internet connection to remote schools through
a "Motoman system."
The Internet Village Motoman system is an innovative
way of providing e-mail connection to villages where internet
infrastructure does not exist. Every morning, motorcycles equipped
with a wifi modem on the back upload e-mails addressed to schools
on the route from a satellite dish installed at a hub school.
Each motorcycle travels to schools on their route, also equipped
with a wifi modem which uploads and downloads e-mails. We have
successfully implemented this system in eight villages, shortly
to be increased to 15, increasing village accessibility to 80,
soon 150 villages.
The school project has been a success in terms
of continual increase in student attendance and raising the
level of education. Our surveys, however, show that attendance
of girls remains low and as a result they stay illiterate. A
further study showed that the main reason girls do not attend
school is poverty and pressures upon them to help the family
with work in the field, or to take care of younger siblings
and stay home while the parents are farming in the fields. We
identified and interviewed such girls and families in five villages
and found that while they said they wanted to and promised to
attend school, immediate economic pressures eventually prevented
them from doing so.
The Girls be Ambitious program provides an
incentive for girls and their families to enable them to attend
school by providing financial assistance of $10 a month, $120
a year for "perfect" attendance. Every month, the
home room teacher will e-mail us an Excel attendance sheet for
each sponsored girl. Our accountant will authorize immediate
payment of $10 to the family if the girl had "perfect"
attendance. If the girl does not have perfect attendance, she
will not be paid that month and we will look into reasons why.
If it is an illness, there will be a reduction in the stipend
but other absences will be judged more severely.
At the start of the program, we will ask the
participating families to sign an agreement to refund the money
if the participant drops out within six months of the program's
launch. We may not get all the funds back but feel this pressure
will provide an incentive to fulfill the requirement of the
program. To insure the integrity of the program, we will conduct
spot checks by surveying fellow classmates and penalize teachers
for any dishonesty with a reduction of their salary.
In addition to the regular school curriculum,
participants of the Girls be Ambitious program will be provided
with training in English, computer skills, handicrafts, agriculture
and other vocational skills.
 |
|
Students and
parents at the opening ceremony which the donors attended. |
Our awareness-raising program will include
staff visits to villages and meetings with families of Girls
be Ambitious participants, viewing visual aid training films,
producing comic books and e-mailing frequent newsletters and
educational materials to be posted on village bulletin boards.
We are also planning to gather all our village
computer and English teachers, already directly assigned by
us, graduates of the JRfC/AAfC-sponsored program at the Future
Light Orphanage, to workshops where they will be briefed on
the human trafficking problem in Cambodia and survey and reporting
methodology. We will invite experts in the field of human trafficking
to help us provide such training.
The program is intended to both prevent trafficking
and empower women, now experiencing low status in their society.
After one year, we will provide an in-depth report that can
serve as a model to bring 50,000 Cambodian girls into the program
as well as be replicated around the world.
Because most of our rural schools will be able
to access the internet and send and receive e-mail, we are unique
in being capable of succeeding in running such a program.
Anyone interested in learning more please contact:
Japan Relief for Cambodia
4-1-7-605 Hiroo
Shibuya-ku, Tokyo (150-0012) Japan
or
American Assistance for Cambodia
N° 50B, Street 240
12207 Phnom Penh, Cambodia
www.cambodiaschools.com
For more on Bernie Krisher founder of JRfC/AAfC
and his work please visit:
http://www.time.com/time/asia/2005/heroes/bernard_krisher.html
http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/technology/article/0,8707,132691,00.html
 |
|
Bernard Krisher
teaching a student how to handle a mouse on the new Macintosh
donated to the school by Apple-Japan. |
All photos and captions downloaded from: http://www.camnet.com.kh/cambodiaschools/photo_gallery.htm