Half Way Home

I can’t believe that it’s June and I’m nearly half way through my assignment in Cambodia. Time has flown.

I’ve really enjoyed my time here, so much so that I’ve even considered how I might stay here and work for awhile longer. VSO has liked what I've brought to my work and has asked me to extend my work here as well. I must say, the pace of life and the impact of my work are two really enticing realities.

Studying and researching Enterprise Development has been a very unique project for me rather than building enterprises. Actually, what I’ve been doing is creating a business plan for VSO to get into the business of building businesses. But I can see why VSO wanted an experienced entrepreneur to design this intervention. Who would know more about what to look for and to design a workable plan?

VSO is really thinking outside of the box on this one, seeing that it usually focuses on capacity building in other organizations. They are aligning with current development approaches which very reluctantly embrace private enterprise as probably the most sustainable and effective solution to poverty. A major problem is that it is one thing to recognize what needs to be done, but it's another thing entirely to actually be able to do it. NGOs are not business builders per se. But they do have the right aim at trying to help poor people, so we must also design this into the project so that we don't just assume benefits will trickle down to the poor automatically. We must take the best of both business and NGO approaches.

My role here is to develop an executable plan that will support the development of enterprises owned by relatively poor people in small villages. That means study the problem, understand the enabling environment, find strategic partners, uncover money, and formulate a detailed plan that will create more financial opportunity for poor families. They’ve scheduled six months for the project so that I can take my time, what with the cultural differences, the relative alien quality of the economic and business conditions here, and the nature of NGO work.

Coming here, I thought, ‘Great, let’s help some fishermen make a little more money by helping them build their businesses better…(yadi, yadi, yadi)’. What I now know are two things: one is that I am a spoiled business child reared in the American garden of business Eden and never knew it. And two, while the Cambodian business context has formidable problems there are still some very significant and impacting strategies I’m seeing.

Can you imagine operating a business in an environment where your government is a serious predator? Where the judiciary makes such erratic decisions that you know you’d better only do business with people you trust? Where contracts are nearly unenforceable? Where property rights are cloudy? Where access to credit has such a high threshold that you must have three times the amount of assets to the size of the loan you take, and you have to pay it back in one year at 18% interest? Where paying bribes to police and government officials are part of the business plan? Where you avoid becoming too successful for fear of reprisal?

Yet even in the midst of all of this there is still opportunity. It comes in the form of problems to be solved, which is an entrepreneur’s dream. Businesses and entire industries are formed to solve problems and Cambodia has a lot of them!

I look forward to sharing my plans for enterprise development in the next few weeks as the project comes together. I’m very excited about its possibilities and impact on poor people who depend on fishing, as is VSO, about the preliminary recommendations I am making that are currently under consideration. After a conference call on Wednesday with VSO’s international Livelihoods Programme Director and then a planning meeting with the Livelihoods Team in Cambodia we are now ready to proceed with writing up the project proposal and identify donors. Stay tuned.