BY MAYUMI SAITO STAFF WRITER
Asahi (Japan)
IN APRIL 2003, Sayaka Murata, then a college junior, met two sisters, ages 6 and 12, at a child prostitution shelter in Phnom Penh. She assumed they were the children of members of the staff. She was wrong.
"I was shocked to learn the ages of the residents of the shelter," she recalls. "The youngest girl was 5. They all worked at brothels."
While playing together with the girls for about an hour, Murata learned that they had only left a brothel six months before. The 12-year-old girl put a flower in Murata's hair, while her sister played with a knitting kit.
Both bore scars on their arms from electric shocks administered when they had tried to refuse to prostitute themselves. The abused girls didn't want to let Murata go and she didn't want to leave.
Murata was visiting the shelter during a research trip for a planned NPO social venture project.
A year later, she went back to the same shelter only to find the sisters gone. They had been forced back into a brothel to pay off their parents' debts. The tragic news reaffirmed Murata's commitment to help abused girls in Cambodia.
Since her teens, Murata knew she wanted to help improve the lives of people overseas. This desire found a direction when she was 19 and met a 5-year-old HIV carrier at an AIDS shelter in Chiang Mai, Thailand, while visiting NGOs in August 2001. The girl's 17-year-old mother had contracted the virus while working as a prostitute.
"The child wouldn't have been born with such a social disadvantage if child prostitution hadn't existed in the first place," Murata, now 25, says. "I looked for what I could do after returning to Japan."
She researched the child prostitution issue and started making five-minute presentations on the subject in her classes at college.
The following December, the sophomore was offered the chance to serve as a Japanese youth representative to the Second World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children hosted in Yokohama by the foreign affairs ministry.
After the conference, Murata wanted to educate the Japanese public about the child prostitution problem, but she really didn't know where to start.
Even when she gave lectures at college, she saw the same faces again and again. She knew she was preaching to the choir. At last, Murata came across two students about her age--Kenta Aoki and Keisuke Motoki--at a University of Tokyo seminar on entrepreneurship. The University of Tokyo students were shocked to learn about child prostitution in Southeast Asia and moved by Murata's commitment. The three talked about starting a social venture to address the issue.
Murata, Aoki and Motoki founded the Kamonohashi (Duckbill) Project in July 2002. The project's chief mission was to tackle the root cause of the problem: poverty. While networking with local NGOs to shelter endangered children, they wanted to boost the local economy.
That December, the three students started an IT business as part of the project. They solicited Web site coding commissions from Japanese companies to earn capital for their work.
The goal was to offer IT training to Cambodian parents and education to their children. Ultimately, with computer-savvy workers in place, Japanese companies could outsource jobs to them.
Meanwhile, Murata traveled to Thailand and Cambodia. After on-site studies, she felt Cambodia needed more help.
The number of child prostitution victims topped out around 28,000 in Thailand in 1988. Since, the figure has dropped drastically thanks to a school enrollment rate of 80 percent and stricter enforcement of anti-prostitution laws. Meanwhile, Cambodia's sex industry has expanded, and the number of underage prostitutes has grown since the late 1980's. Murata blames widening economic disparities and other causes for the problem.
Cambodia's regulations on the sex trade are loose, and more than 15,000 children have been forced into prostitution. It is a constant struggle for poor farmers to feed their families with their small rice paddies. Many end up as day laborers for large landowners to make ends meet and pay off debts, Murata says. If they become ill and unable to work, these farmers sometimes sell their daughters.
Thirty-five percent of the Cambodian population lives below the poverty line, making less than $1 a day. Despite an education system that is free through high school, only 30 percent of boys and 20 percent of girls make it to junior high school. The rest of the children join the labor force in farm villages, Murata says.
A month after Murata met the two sisters at the child prostitution refuge in Phnom Penh, she won 500,000 yen for the Kamonohashi Project from a business-plan competition for social ventures. In June 2003, the three students finally opened a Tokyo office in Suginami Ward after getting advice from business consultants and other entrepreneurs.
More than a year later, in August 2004, they opened a Phnom Penh office with Japanese and local staff members and began networking with local NGOs involved in fighting the trafficking of children. The Kamonohashi Project gained legal NPO status in September of that year.
The following December, Murata and the staff opened a computer school at the Phnom Penh office targeting former street children and kids from poor households. Using a local instructor, the school has taught three-month courses in Microsoft Word, Excel and graphic design to more than 100 children.
Narun used to make his living picking up trash until he was taken in by a local NGO. He started junior high school and took graphic and Web design courses at Kamonohashi in 2005 and 2006. His hard work paid off. When he was 16, Narun was admitted to a high school in Singapore.
Murata won a Nikkei Woman of the Year 2006 award in the leadership category. She was the youngest-ever recipient of the honor.
Last summer, the Kamanohashi Project collaborated with the Japanese kimono maker Hirocoledge and a Japanese NGO that provides vocational training to Cambodian women. The group produces obi belts woven with Cambodian silk and sells them on the Internet. "We actually were more interested in introducing Cambodia to our customers than making money with the obi project," Murata says.
Now, with more than 20 staff members in their Tokyo's Shibuya and Phnom Penh offices, the Kamonohashi Project keeps rolling along. Starting this year, the staff opened a community factory in Spean Tnot village, Siem Riep Province, 68 kilometers southeast of Angkor Wat. By providing vocational training and jobs in the poor village, the factory is helping to slow the migration of unskilled, vulnerable workers to the cities.
About 30 people are learning to weave rush mats there. "We first thought of silk fabric or mango processing. But they are costly and time consuming. On the other hand, you can learn to weave mats with three months of training and find the plant nearly everywhere," Murata says.
They also take the woven rush mats to another vocational center nearby to sew them into handicrafts. The products are marketed in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. Trained workers make about $1 a day--enough to support a village family, according to Murata.
Ing is a 15-year-old girl who has never been to school and must support her grandmother and two sisters. Her father died of AIDS contracted while working in Thailand. Ing's mother and younger brother (who was born HIV positive) also died of AIDS. While free of the virus herself, "Ing would have been forced out to the city for work, if the community center didn't exist," Murata says.
The Kamonohashi Project plans to continue to train workers in Spean Tnot and hopes to make 200 households financially independent by 2008. "It's important that they make money on their own. Then they can run the center itself and eventually make a profit," Murata says. The project also aims to save 1,000 children from poverty and prostitution in collaboration with local NGOs.
While the Kamonohashi Project's IT business is still solely run by the Tokyo staff and has to be subsidized, it's the project's main income source.
Asked what keeps her motivated, Murata again talks about the two little sisters she met at the child prostitution shelter: "I can never allow myself to forget them. Kids must be protected. Somebody has to help."
"I was shocked to learn the ages of the residents of the shelter," she recalls. "The youngest girl was 5. They all worked at brothels."
While playing together with the girls for about an hour, Murata learned that they had only left a brothel six months before. The 12-year-old girl put a flower in Murata's hair, while her sister played with a knitting kit.
Both bore scars on their arms from electric shocks administered when they had tried to refuse to prostitute themselves. The abused girls didn't want to let Murata go and she didn't want to leave.
Murata was visiting the shelter during a research trip for a planned NPO social venture project.
A year later, she went back to the same shelter only to find the sisters gone. They had been forced back into a brothel to pay off their parents' debts. The tragic news reaffirmed Murata's commitment to help abused girls in Cambodia.
Since her teens, Murata knew she wanted to help improve the lives of people overseas. This desire found a direction when she was 19 and met a 5-year-old HIV carrier at an AIDS shelter in Chiang Mai, Thailand, while visiting NGOs in August 2001. The girl's 17-year-old mother had contracted the virus while working as a prostitute.
"The child wouldn't have been born with such a social disadvantage if child prostitution hadn't existed in the first place," Murata, now 25, says. "I looked for what I could do after returning to Japan."
She researched the child prostitution issue and started making five-minute presentations on the subject in her classes at college.
The following December, the sophomore was offered the chance to serve as a Japanese youth representative to the Second World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children hosted in Yokohama by the foreign affairs ministry.
After the conference, Murata wanted to educate the Japanese public about the child prostitution problem, but she really didn't know where to start.
Even when she gave lectures at college, she saw the same faces again and again. She knew she was preaching to the choir. At last, Murata came across two students about her age--Kenta Aoki and Keisuke Motoki--at a University of Tokyo seminar on entrepreneurship. The University of Tokyo students were shocked to learn about child prostitution in Southeast Asia and moved by Murata's commitment. The three talked about starting a social venture to address the issue.
Murata, Aoki and Motoki founded the Kamonohashi (Duckbill) Project in July 2002. The project's chief mission was to tackle the root cause of the problem: poverty. While networking with local NGOs to shelter endangered children, they wanted to boost the local economy.
That December, the three students started an IT business as part of the project. They solicited Web site coding commissions from Japanese companies to earn capital for their work.
The goal was to offer IT training to Cambodian parents and education to their children. Ultimately, with computer-savvy workers in place, Japanese companies could outsource jobs to them.
Meanwhile, Murata traveled to Thailand and Cambodia. After on-site studies, she felt Cambodia needed more help.
The number of child prostitution victims topped out around 28,000 in Thailand in 1988. Since, the figure has dropped drastically thanks to a school enrollment rate of 80 percent and stricter enforcement of anti-prostitution laws. Meanwhile, Cambodia's sex industry has expanded, and the number of underage prostitutes has grown since the late 1980's. Murata blames widening economic disparities and other causes for the problem.
Cambodia's regulations on the sex trade are loose, and more than 15,000 children have been forced into prostitution. It is a constant struggle for poor farmers to feed their families with their small rice paddies. Many end up as day laborers for large landowners to make ends meet and pay off debts, Murata says. If they become ill and unable to work, these farmers sometimes sell their daughters.
Thirty-five percent of the Cambodian population lives below the poverty line, making less than $1 a day. Despite an education system that is free through high school, only 30 percent of boys and 20 percent of girls make it to junior high school. The rest of the children join the labor force in farm villages, Murata says.
A month after Murata met the two sisters at the child prostitution refuge in Phnom Penh, she won 500,000 yen for the Kamonohashi Project from a business-plan competition for social ventures. In June 2003, the three students finally opened a Tokyo office in Suginami Ward after getting advice from business consultants and other entrepreneurs.
More than a year later, in August 2004, they opened a Phnom Penh office with Japanese and local staff members and began networking with local NGOs involved in fighting the trafficking of children. The Kamonohashi Project gained legal NPO status in September of that year.
The following December, Murata and the staff opened a computer school at the Phnom Penh office targeting former street children and kids from poor households. Using a local instructor, the school has taught three-month courses in Microsoft Word, Excel and graphic design to more than 100 children.
Narun used to make his living picking up trash until he was taken in by a local NGO. He started junior high school and took graphic and Web design courses at Kamonohashi in 2005 and 2006. His hard work paid off. When he was 16, Narun was admitted to a high school in Singapore.
Murata won a Nikkei Woman of the Year 2006 award in the leadership category. She was the youngest-ever recipient of the honor.
Last summer, the Kamanohashi Project collaborated with the Japanese kimono maker Hirocoledge and a Japanese NGO that provides vocational training to Cambodian women. The group produces obi belts woven with Cambodian silk and sells them on the Internet. "We actually were more interested in introducing Cambodia to our customers than making money with the obi project," Murata says.
Now, with more than 20 staff members in their Tokyo's Shibuya and Phnom Penh offices, the Kamonohashi Project keeps rolling along. Starting this year, the staff opened a community factory in Spean Tnot village, Siem Riep Province, 68 kilometers southeast of Angkor Wat. By providing vocational training and jobs in the poor village, the factory is helping to slow the migration of unskilled, vulnerable workers to the cities.
About 30 people are learning to weave rush mats there. "We first thought of silk fabric or mango processing. But they are costly and time consuming. On the other hand, you can learn to weave mats with three months of training and find the plant nearly everywhere," Murata says.
They also take the woven rush mats to another vocational center nearby to sew them into handicrafts. The products are marketed in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. Trained workers make about $1 a day--enough to support a village family, according to Murata.
Ing is a 15-year-old girl who has never been to school and must support her grandmother and two sisters. Her father died of AIDS contracted while working in Thailand. Ing's mother and younger brother (who was born HIV positive) also died of AIDS. While free of the virus herself, "Ing would have been forced out to the city for work, if the community center didn't exist," Murata says.
The Kamonohashi Project plans to continue to train workers in Spean Tnot and hopes to make 200 households financially independent by 2008. "It's important that they make money on their own. Then they can run the center itself and eventually make a profit," Murata says. The project also aims to save 1,000 children from poverty and prostitution in collaboration with local NGOs.
While the Kamonohashi Project's IT business is still solely run by the Tokyo staff and has to be subsidized, it's the project's main income source.
Asked what keeps her motivated, Murata again talks about the two little sisters she met at the child prostitution shelter: "I can never allow myself to forget them. Kids must be protected. Somebody has to help."
1 comment:
MAY THE LORD JESUS CHRIST BLESS YOU ALWAYS MADAM.
from Woodhy Chamron
and Rachel Elisabeth Chamron
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