The Cambodian Children's Trust's (CCT) mission is to create a sustainable and scalable social protection system that can be replicated across Cambodia by embedding community-run services into villages and mobilising community-wide action to protect vulnerable children and strengthen their families.
CCT is a Khmer-led organisation focused on building community-run social protection systems to strengthen families and keep children safe through promoting local agency, community empowerment and sovereignty.
CCT was founded in 2007, to rescue 14 children from a corrupt and abusive orphanage in Battambang, Cambodia. Following the rescue, CCT initially operated as an orphanage. Upon learning of the harms of institutional care on the development of children, CCT worked to reunite the children with their families and communities of origin. CCT then became the first orphanage in Cambodia to transition its model from orphanage to a holistic, community-based social protection model, now known as the Village Hive.
The model was co-designed with local communities to combat and prevent multidimensional poverty by bringing holistic services into villages and mobilising community-wide action to protect vulnerable children, prevent child-family separation, reunite families and foster long-term resilience and self-sufficiency.
Today, CCT operates a centralised Village Hive model that reaches 104 villages and has prevented thousands of children from ending up in orphanages and reunited hundreds of children in orphanages with their families.
CCT’s track record in systems building and sustainable programming has led to CCT being recognised as an innovative leader in the Cambodian child protection sector and has become the largest implementing partner of the FCF|REAcT Network.
CCT is currently focused on building an evidence base for the localisation of its Village Hive model, which will result in a tangible exit strategy for the organisation.
Cambodian Children’s Trust has responded to a Faith to Action survey stating that they have supported residential care centers to transition to family-based care.
Where they operate
Contact this organization about:
Organization Size
Headquarters Location
PO Box 376
Battambang Province
Battambang
Cambodia
Organization Type
Main Areas of Work
Village Hive
CCT’s Village Hive achieves great success in addressing multidimensional poverty, empowering families to escape poverty and provide for their children.
CCT operates a holistic model of social support called the Village Hive that is co-designed with communities. The model has been developed in a pilot, learn and grow approach in partnership with the Family Care First network. The Village Hive model combats and prevents multidimensional poverty by building resilient communities. It brings a holistic range of services into villages and mobilises community-wide action to protect vulnerable children and strengthen their families.
Village Hive Health Services
When physical or mental health issues are preventing a family from achieving their goals, the family's social worker will recruit the assistance of a Village Hive nurse. Nurses conduct home visits to undertake basic health assessments, facilitate connection to hospitals and specialty health services and work with the families to create healthcare plans that address acute and chronic conditions. When Village Hive nurses see health trends in a community, they conduct preventative health workshops, including providing hygiene supplies, personal protective equipment and safety information throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Village Hive Family Finance Services
Families are coached in financial literacy aimed at overcoming the psychological phenomenon of the scarcity mindset. The coaching teaches families how to track their spending, maintain a budget, develop a savings plan, and grow their income through child-sensitive livelihoods or access to employment. Families are empowered to look beyond their immediate needs and set long-term goals to achieve financial freedom. The coaching is mostly geared towards women who have proven to be the best poverty fighters, using the profits for the benefit of their families.
Village Hive Youth Centres
Youth Centres deliver nutritious meals, daycare and remedial tutoring to highly vulnerable children while Village Hive social workers are helping their families work towards their long-term goals to provide for their children. Youth Centres prevent child-family separation for cases in which carers are elderly, have a disability, or a chronic physical or mental health issue. Children from these vulnerable families are able to access all their essential needs while remaining living with their family, preventing them from requiring alternative care to access services.
Capacity Building of Local Authorities
Training in child protection, administration, management, policy development, HR, finance, anti-corruptions, child safeguarding, reporting and monitoring and evaluation.
Child Protection Networks
Elected or self nominated community members whose role is to identify risk factors within their community and identify and refer all child protection concerns for social work interventions.
We asked this organization to tell us a little more about their learning and knowledge sharing practices. Here is what they said
CCT measures success by the long-term sustainability of its programs. In 2013, CCT established a social enterprise restaurant called Jaan Bai. The restaurant is now run and managed independently of CCT by Cambodian youth in a profit-share agreement and donates a percentage of proceeds to support CCT’s work.
In 2015, CCT partnered with the five public high schools and the teacher training college in Battambang City to develop an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) program. The program is now embedded into the national high school curriculum and is fully-funded and operated by the public schools with over 20,000 students having completed the course. Students have gone on to win national competitions and complete computer science degrees.
By any measure, the program was an enormous success, which made it even more devastating when we found out that the sole donor for the project would not be able to continue funding. CCT made the tough decision to not seek additional funding from elsewhere in order to retain our focus on our core work in child and family welfare. We thought the project would close, and the computer labs would fall into disrepair.
That’s not what happened. We had co-designed the program in partnership with the public schools, so they had ownership of the program and wanted to see its continued success. They made a choice to invest in the program and have continued to raise the funds to operate it completely independently of CCT. More than three years on, the program is still fully operational with thousands of new students enrolling each year.
This is evidence of a truly sustainable project and highlights the importance of collaborative program design and the need to work within local public systems, rather than private NGO programs run in parallel.
CCT’s journey from a downstream, rescue model of the orphanage to an upstream, empowerment model of the Village Hive, demonstrates that it’s possible to dismantle harmful systems of control and oppression and transform into systems that prevent trauma and allow people to self-determine their own lives.
This learning has resulted ensuring that the following values underpin our strategic direction:
- Holistic: A holistic approach is required to untangle the complex web of social issues that cause crises in families and keep them trapped in a cycle of multidimensional poverty
- Preventative: An upstream approach is required to prevent children from experiencing the lifelong effects of trauma from early-childhood adversity, abuse, institutionalisation and separation from family
- Co-designed: The knowledge and wisdom required to solve complex social problems lives within local communities. The people whose lives are affected by programming decisions, need to be the ones making the decision. All stakeholders, including and especially beneficiaries, must have seats at the decision-making table and be the architects of the programs.
- Sustainable: To create systemic change, projects must transition into independence and be delivered by the public sector, leading to a tangible exit strategy for CCT.
- Collaborative program design with communities and beneficiaries is essential.
- What is your exit strategy?
The pilot, learn and grow approach which is adopted across the FCF|REACT network has been embedded in CCT’s work since 2016, ensuring action research is at the heart of our implementation. Action research involves a dynamic and cyclical process of planning, acting, observing, learning, reflecting and growing through a participatory group process. This is conducted via planning meetings, and reflection workshops.
CCT utilises a non-paternalistic, collaborative and empowerment approach to all aspects of the model. Risks are identified by the family and community and solutions are co-designed with all relevant stakeholders. The inclusion of families and children’s voices in the assessment of their own risk and identifying their own solutions is fundamental to achieving the desired outcomes.
CCT has developed robust MEAL frameworks to demonstrate outcomes achieved. Both qualitative and quantitative data is collected and analysed monthly. Individual cases are assessed and reviewed six monthly to ensure that interventions are reducing identified risks and increasing protective factors and the case plan developed by the family is achieving the goals set. All cases that are safely exited must be signed off by local authorities and demonstrate reduced risks.
Evaluations, focus group discussions, feedback mechanisms and surveys with key stakeholders are routinely conducted to help inform new iterations and adaptations to the model based on the community’s evolving needs.
We believe that best practice is achieved through teamwork, partnerships and collaboration. We do not recreate wheels or duplicate resources. Instead we harness the power of collaborative networks of non governmental organisations, government organisations and the communities themselves. We share our challenges and expertise whilst utilising the invaluable learning of others.
Members of:
- FCF|REACT Network
- 3PC (Partnership Program for the Protection of Children) Network
- Rethink Orphanages
- Childsafe Alliance.
