A Change of Guard

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Monday 11 May 2015

Aid cuts a blow to Cambodian dreams

THE hopes and plans of Australian families aren't the only ones riding on this week's federal budget.
A WORLD away in remote villages in Cambodia's Siem Reap province, the chance for some families to escape the harrowing hand to mouth existence of extreme poverty is about to slip away.
Plan Australia's empowering community project will be a casualty of the Abbott government's $11.3 billion cut to Australia's foreign aid budget.
For Cambodian widow Chheum Chhean, whose family were among 3000 to receive mentoring, counselling and agricultural training, the program has been life changing.
The widowed mother-of-three was only able to reach grade three at school.
Support from Plan, in conjunction with Krousar Yoeung, a local non-government organisation, has kept her youngest daughter in high school and on a path to achieving her dream to be a doctor.
Sum Seyvean, 15, is now in grade seven thanks to a scholarship that covers the cost of her school uniform, books and a bicycle to get to class.
She hopes to be the first in her family to go to university.
"I want to help cure tuberculosis because a lot of people in my village have that disease," Sum told AAP through an interpreter.
Sum will also turn her sights on malaria, which claimed her father 13 years ago and left her mother to raise three children on the 78 cents a day she could earn from working eight hours a day in the rice paddy of a neighbouring farmer.
Previously the family lived in a tiny hut, the size of a chicken coop, which frequently flooded during the rainy season.
Plan helped them move into a new house - a modest wooden hut raised a storey off the ground.
Ms Chhean now earns between $3.25 and $3.90 a day from raising chickens. Her pig recently had 14 piglets of which she sold eight for $39 each.

She also grows vegetables and fruit.
Plan had hoped to expand the program to cover 8500 families or 45,000 people.
But the entire project will cease next June.
Plan has already lost $649,000 in funding, anticipates a $1.9 million hit next financial year and another one of $4.2 million the following year.
COMPARISON CAMBODIA VERSUS AUSTRALIA
* Cambodia: Population 14.68 million people, 80 per cent live in rural areas. (Australia: 23.8 million)
* Life expectancy: 63.4 years (Australia: 82.07 years)
* Maternal mortality rate: 250 for every 100,000 live births (Australia: 6.8 deaths per 100,000 live births)
* More than one in 12 children die before their fifth birthday (Australia: four children in every 1000 don't reach age five)
* Average years of schooling 5.8 (Australia: 12 years)
* Access to improved drinking water: 93.9 per cent urban, 65.6 per cent rural. (Australia: 100 per cent)
* Extreme poverty rate, defined as people on less than $US1.25 ($A1.59) a day, has decreased from 47.8 percent in 2007 to 18.9 percent or three million people in 2012.
* $US1036 ($A1,321.85) per capita GDP (Australia: $43,000 per capita)
* Ranked 138 out of 185 countries on the Human Development Index in 2013 (Australia ranked 2)
(Source: UNDP/Plan Australia/ABS)

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