Cambodia: A better life for the beer girls

Beer girl serving in a beer garden (Photo: The Phnom Penh Post)

December 9 2010
By Elaine Moore
Financial Times

Every night, in one of Cambodia’s many open air restaurants, beer girls walk between tables of customers, topping up glasses and adding the huge chunks of ice Cambodians insist is dropped in their beer.

In their short red dresses, decorated with the logo of the brand they sell, the girls are easy to pick out in the near-darkness of the open-air restaurants, and many are invited to sit at the tables and talk. The chat may be over-familiar but it is, on the whole, respectful.

Treatment of beer promotion girls in Cambodia has markedly improved in recent years as a result of a successful partnership between the government, local non-government organisations, funded in part by the UN, and The Beer Selling Industry Cambodia, which represents Heineken and Carlsberg among others.

Beer girls are not sex workers, but their youth and line of work made them a regular target for unwanted advances, even abuse. The successful co-operation between rights groups and companies to provide training and other initiatives such as a harassment reporting hotline, have had a pronounced effect on the girls’ working lives.

Those involved hope the model of businesses taking advice from rights groups and improving the protection of their workers will be replicated.

At a time when cracks in the relationship between Cambodia’s government and the international development community working in the country are frequently in the local news, such schemes are an effective way to show that public and private sector aims can be compatible.

There are already several projects underway. LG Electronics recently announced a three-year partnership to support work by the UN World Food Programme in Cambodia to aid road links between markets and schools, and the World Health Organisation is supporting its national counterpart in working with the private sector to make anti-malarial drugs affordable to all Cambodians.

Private sector partnerships are an essential element of development in Cambodia, declares MP Joseph, chief technical advisor for the International Labour Organization. “They may be more difficult to establish and sustain in the early stages of development and growth of a country. But very soon, as is happening in Cambodia, development strategies need to bring in the private sector.”

Such strategies have been employed to work with foreign and local business owners in Cambodia as part of the ILO “better factories” campaign to improve working conditions for garment factory workers.

Relationships have also been forged with local companies in a scheme to help end child labour. Private micro-finance institutions such as Amret have been approached to help educate families in how they can replace income lost when a child returns to school.

In return, Mr Chea Phalarim, general manager at Amret, said working with the ILO had increased the organisation’s client base, bringing it into contact with eligible customers in remote locations. The benefits, he says, work both ways.

Aid remains crucial to Cambodia’s economy. Despite the global economic downturn and criticism from human rights groups, aid provision is expected to increase from $990m in 2009 to $1.1bn this year.

But foreign direct investment is also on the rise. Chinese and Korean investors are back after a hiatus caused by the global financial downturn, and are ready to fund large projects without governance strings attached.

In May 2010, at the inaugaration of the Cambodia-China Prek Kdam Friendship Bridge, funded largely by a loan from China, the Cambodian prime minister thanked the Chinese for lending money “without setting complicated conditions” – an implied dig at the requirements made by aid donors.

In 2008 China became the largest foreign investor in Cambodia, with more than $8bn invested, and bilateral trade between the two countries rose by more than a third in this first half of 2010 compared to the previous year.

Government tetchiness towards the development community, meanwhile, has been palpable. Prime minister Hun Sen, who has held power since 1993, has previously dismissed UN rights staff as nothing more than long term tourists.

This year he has asked the UN to limit the work done by the international tribunal trying former members of the Khmer Rouge regime and accused Christophe Peschoux, the country director of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, of being a spokesperson for the opposition party. In March, Cambodian foreign minister Hor Namhong criticised UN country head Douglas Broderick after he asked for more time to review a new anti-corruption law.

The situation for UN staff working in Cambodia is very different to that of the 1990s, when Security Council members expressed fear for the lives of staff. The country is stable, peaceful, and for many a pleasant place to live. Those working in the development sector are expected to be sensitive to the politics of their work and all UN staff receive an orientation session to provide them with an overview of Cambodia.

Nevertheless public attacks on work by certain agencies can make working lives difficult. One former staff member of the international tribunal said government disapprobation didn’t help the morale of staff already engaged in a difficult job.

Previous attacks on NGOs, and the expulsion of some organisations from the country, have demanded caution and diplomacy from international development organisations.

UN agencies in the country play down the friction, but few staff members would allow themselves to be quoted on the topic. Representatives say that open door policies are employed and that meetings are held when situations arise that might concern staff.

Outside the UN Human Rights office in Phnom Penh, focus of multiple threats of closure from the government, a group of Buddhist monks sits in the shade, waiting to collect information to take back to their pagodas. Inside, in an office stacked with reports, deputy country representative James Heenan insists that work continues as normal.

“Human rights work regularly involves the burden of working in difficult environments and being subject to pressure from many quarters. It’s part of the job.”