Does it Work? Community Development Through Empowerment: A Case of Cambodia

Abstract

Cambodia is in the need of urgent development and cooperation in order to push its status out of poverty and the issues that stem from it. To take action, the government has welcomed and supported cooperation internationally with many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) ever since the genocidal regime ended and their efforts have extended to the most vulnerable areas of resettlements. Local community development is the core concentration promoted by these institutions toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals. To raise communities’ strengths, national and international NGOs and government agencies have implemented series of development plans over times as a developmental bottom-up strategy. One of which that applies a grassroots approach is empowerment. Although there are special projects and tools empowering people in these local communities towards sustainable development and self-reliance, and reducing poverty to minimum level, it seems there are questions whether poor people are really empowered by the approach. This study aims to describe how empowerment tackles eight components vulnerable to the poor, viz., basic health and HIV and AIDS, disaster preparedness, community development, human rights and advocacy, income generation, food security, environment and education. It also reveals a model created to assess and measure empowerment level on the mentioned elements using the World Bank’s four indicators of empowerment (access to information, inclusion and participation, accountability, and local organizational capacity). As a result, with fairly great success, a set of policies and leadership from stakeholders is needed in order to ensure local sustainability.