Cambodia, UN hold forum to promote women's entrepreneurship

Phnom Penh, June 6 (Xinhua): Cambodia's ministry of women' s affairs and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) on Wednesday jointly organized a forum on women's entrepreneurship promotion to discuss challenges women are facing in business management.

The one-day forum was attended by some 80 high-level government representatives, international experts, leaders of women's business associations, women's producers groups, entrepreneurs and economic experts, Ing Kantha Phavi, minister of women's affairs, said in her opening address.

Being positive: HIV-affected women turn entrepreneurs

Wednesday August 22, 2007
Hindustan Times (India)

SRIM PHAN had little to do with her time before she set up and a garment manufacturing unit in Cambodia. Called Modern Dress Sewing Factory, the unit today hires 30 people, 27 of whom are HIV positive. Phan is the general manager of the organisation.

Like Phan, P. Kousalya set up a conceptual design and printing business in Chennai employing four persons who have tested HIV positive or have AIDS. Yet, the six-month-old enterprise has already recorded profits. In addition, Kousalya has an enviable list of clients: she has designed logos for UN agencies, apart from pamphlets for NGOs, menus for local restaurants and catalogues for promoters.

Both enterprises are part of a UNDP-funded Women and Wealth Development programme to help HIV-positive women set up small, independent businesses to enable them to be financially independent. "I now get a salary every month and can pay for my daughters' education without having to worry about where the money will come from," said Phan.

Women account for almost 40 per cent of HIV infection cases-the figure is 44 per cent for India. A majority of this are monogamous, married women who get infected by their husband. Once the husband dies of AIDS, many, like Kousalya, get thrown out of their homes when they also test HIV positive. "My husband was a trucker and when he died in December, 2001, I was already very sick. I was not trained for anything and had no place to go. I soon found out that there were many other women in a similar situation," said Kousalya.

Refusing to get cowed down, Kousalya came up with the idea to form a support group for HIV-positive women. She set up the Positive Women's Network, which she now heads. A UNDP study in South Asia shows 40 per cent women are thrown out of their in-laws' home after the death of their husbands, and 80 per cent are denied property rights.

Across Asia, the pattern the HIV infection takes has shown a general trend, progressing from injecting drug users to sex workers; then clients of sex workers, who transmit the virus to their wives. And these women, to their children.

"In this chain, monogamous married women, who would normally be under little threat of infection, are the silent sufferers. Often uneducated and untrained, they have no means of earning a living. This projects helps them become economically independent and cope with the devastating effect of HIV on their lives and those of their children. This is achieved through vocations like designing and printing in India or making beeswax candles in China," said Caitlin Wiesen, programme coordinator, UNDP Regional HIV and Development Programme.

'I am sunlight, not moonlight'

Chanta Nguon shops for raw silk in Phnom Penh (Photo: Chris LeBoutillier)

Thursday, August 16, 2007
Marketplace
National Public Radio (USA)

Click here to listen to the show

Meet a woman who's trying to get Cambodia a piece of the action in the international silk trade. The silk empire she's stitched together is the biggest employer in her province. Rachel Louise Snyder reports.

Transcript of the story:

Kai Ryssdal: Break down the global economy and what do you have left? Get past enormous multinational corporations and smaller domestic companies, and you've got people getting up and going to work every day. Our monthly series, Working, takes us into the lives of individuals in the global economy.

In the international silk trade, the Big Three are India, China and Thailand. Today, we meet a woman who's trying to get Cambodia a piece of that action. The silk empire that she's stitched together is the biggest employer in her province. Rachel Louise Snyder brings us the story of Chanta Nguon.

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Rachel Louise Snyder: Chanta Nguon is a small woman, about 5 feet tall. But she's the economic epicenter of the remote Stung Treng province. So when there's talk about her, the effect can be whopping.

Over breakfast at a sidewalk café one morning, she tells me about a merchant whose disturbing dream about her shook up the locals.

Chanta Nguon: The coffee seller just run to me, "Oh, you still alive! The ghost sleep last night said you die!" I said, "What?"

She doesn't put much stock in ghost gossip. But she's got dreams of her own. Like starting a global business in a nearly illiterate region, where trappings of modernity — like electricity — are scarce.

At 45, Chanta is the picture of elegance, in flowing skirts and dark shades, driving down a red, dusty road on her motorbike to work.

Inside this creaky fence is the four-building silk compound called SWDC, for Stung Treng Women's Development Center. She started this with her husband, Chan.

The spinners use old bicycle rims to spool the thread.

This morning, Chanta rushes past two bright wooden workshops for spinners and weavers, past a kindergarten she built for weavers' children to a corner of the compound, where three young women use bamboo paddles to stir raw silk in boiling dye.

Nguon: So beautiful. This is my latest color.

She calls it:

Nguon: Chili. Yeah? Ripe chili.

Dramatic color is Chanta's genius. Each scarf has layers of subtle hues that change with the light.

Chanta's brand of colorful scarves and pillows are called Mekong Blue. She sells them for $16 to $20, and they end up in fancy boutiques in Germany, France, Poland, Japan and the U.S., where they go for $90 to $100 apiece.

In Mekong Blue's first year, they made $2,500 with five looms. This year, on 33 looms, they'll make $60,000.

While most businesses move toward mechanization, Chanta finds her operation works better with more hands and fewer machines. She once calculated that weavers walk over nine miles, in 11-foot intervals, just separating individual threads to prepare the looms.

Other things are harder to calculate.

Synder: How long does it take to make one average-sized scarf?

Nguon: So first, we spend one hour to wash the silk and one or two days to set up the warp. It just half of it, they need another seven days to finish. For that process, they spend another five days.

Snyder: So how . . . I've lost track, how many days are we up to?

Nguon: Eleven to 12 days.

Snyder: For a scarf.

Nguon: No! To start to weave the scarf.

The grand total? Fifteen days. Unless:

Nguon: You see the pattern, the flower pattern? That's another nine days. But if they make a mistake, then they spend another week to remove everything.

This is obsessive-compulsive work. Sixty full-time women earn $50 to $100 a month, where the country average is $25.

But for the women who work here, it's not just about money. It's about status and education.

Nguon: If we can help woman to have her own income, just automatically she, her value will improve — in the family, in the society.

Her life and her business evolved out of tragedy. During the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge forced the population into farm labor in the countryside. They abolished money and personal freedom. Families were torn apart.

Nguon: One of my brothers, he was taken away. And we don't know if he still alive or he die. We just lost him.

This disastrous social experiment killed an estimated million and a half people.

Chanta and her mother fled to Vietnam, where they spent 10 years. She spent nine more years in a refugee camp on the Thai border. There, she got an education — first in English, then in women's empowerment while working for Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders. She met her husband, Chan, in the camp. And in 1993, they returned to Cambodia.

At home, she meets her friends and family to cook a simple dinner. Here is where she transforms herself from CEO to friend, mother, wife. She washes dishes in a metal bowl and enlists help from her son.

Nguon: Oh, we need banana leaf, Johan. Can you help mama cut it?

Chanta is trained to be something else — not quite Western, not quite Khmer. She's comfortable in charge, at work or at home.

But such confidence means she doesn't fit with village women. So foreigners on temporary contracts for various charities fill her friendship void. But the faces always change. The first time, she says:

Nguon: We become very close friend, and then they left, and I feel sad again. But it just happened again and again. So every year, I have a new friend, and I lose some friends.

Today's menu is Vietnamese crepes. In the background, a radio plays Khmer music. Chanta tries to teach her two friends to fry paper-thin crepes.

Nguon: Is it hot enough, Ali?

The first crepe crumples.

Nguon: That's not Khmer at all.

As Chanta tries to teach her foreign friends Khmer customs, she sometimes struggles with them herself. It's made it tougher for her husband.

For the first 10 years of their marriage, Chan made the decisions. And she stayed quietly at home. But after a while, Chanta felt like she couldn't breathe.

At first, he fought her change.

Nguon: We compare Asian woman with moonlight in the family. Mean soft, cool, quiet. So I live 10 years, my first 10 years of marriage like that. I couldn't speak loudly, and I couldn't laugh loudly. But after 10 years, I feel it's not me at all. So I start to fight with my husband. I want to be myself. Why I can't laugh, why I can't speak loudly? So I told him, I am sunlight, not moonlight.

Ryssdal: Rachel Louise Snyder lives and works in Cambodia. Her report was a co-production with Homelands Productions.