Communities need support - not short answers!

I'm in Ratanakiri (Northeastern Cambodia) this week. In Ratanakiri, we are working with ethnic minorities to integrate avian influenza awareness into community theater and education. We are also working on a pilot of model farms as part of an AI project in this area, working with an organization called Celegrid. We were curious to see how the communities would respond to the model farms, so we presented the model to a group of elders. (Translation here happens 4 fold! English, Khmer, Tampuon and Krung).


Our CARE staff presented and translated the model and then asked the communities to discuss among themselves and report back on their discussion. The points the community came back with were very interesting. They pointed out that organizations had come to them with these suggestions before (such as fence your chickens and separate your poultry). They recognize that these changes will increase their poultry production and protect them from disease. The problem, however, is that organizations never commit enough technical assistance for them to learn and sustain the model!

Since I’ve seen most avian flu programs do just that – promote a few messages and then move on, I feel what they’re saying. I think it would be great if CARE could take an active role in advocating for more in-depth technical assistance at the community level. We’ll see how things go in this project here!

They also mentioned a few areas that seem to be universally difficult with poultry raising – such as finding food for caged poultry or finding the time to devote to a more intensive model of farming. There was one more interesting point that I hadn’t heard. They were worried that if they put all the chickens in a fenced in area, then someone could very easily steal them! I never thought of that…



CARE staff discuss model farms with the elders of the community