Our work so far: Community Learning Centre

CLC is one of the Entrepreneurship teams partners. It’s a free organisation where children and adults can go to learn skills such as music, sewing and mechanics. CLC brought VSO in to work with them so that we could teach a more sustainable and in depth course such as Entrepreneurship; how to create and run your own business successfully.

In the mornings, the building for CLC is a school and CLC runs in the afternoons. We do our sessions on a Tuesday afternoon (2pm-4pm). Students from every course turn up to learn about how they can start their own businesses. For example, the woman in sewing class, once they’ve finished their course, usually end up working in a factory for low pay and also putting themselves in danger. However, they could actually be helping run, or running their own garment shop or seamstress shop. This is the same for musicians and mechanics.

Our first few sessions included “what is an entrepreneur?” in which we explained what qualities you would need if you wanted to start your own business. A lot of these required soft skills, which we teach in our peer to peer sessions.

During training, we were taught a teaching programme (a way of learning and teaching) called C-BED. In our C-BED sessions, we mostly focus on 2 things. 1: SWOT, this stands for Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This is a way to analyse your business plan and see how you can make a sustainable business in a rural community. It’s a lot easier said than done when adding factors such as building rental and costs into it, but our goal is to give them tools they need to make it possible.

SWOT goes a lot more into depth when you add in peer to peer education as we try to get the students to analyse and create different business ideas using SWOT whilst seeing if it is sustainable or plausible in this community.

During a disability session, we created a business plan, showing how you can make a business more inclusive for people with all types of disabilities and how to overcome the barriers that people with disabilities might face. This isn’t as simple as wheelchair access. Disabilities come in all shapes and sizes, a way to overcome a mental barrier could be ensuring that you have a business partner to support you in your journey.

Another part of the C-BED tool is the “5 P’s”, this includes product, place, price, promotion and people. This is a basic marketing template which makes you think about: what your product is, where is the best place to sell this, how much will you charge so that you can make profit, how will you successfully promote your business and what type of people are your target audience.

In Cambodia, a common struggle and misunderstanding is where you will put your business. Someone will see (for example) a seamstress business being successful and therefore think it’s the exact place to put their own seamstress business. This chain continues for many businesses which results in 10+ seamstress shops right next to each other. Nobody will benefit from this as the more shops with the same content that are next to each other, the less everyone will make and then businesses will start failing. We try to explain that a successful business is one which fills the gap of something missing. An ideal place for a seamstress shop is somewhere where there isn’t one for a while. Therefore, more customers will go to their shop resulting in more profit and a sustainable business.

As our sessions are quite heavy on information and learning, we like to play energisers to keep people on the ball and having fun. These are simple, childhood games such as wink murder and splat. One of their favourites (and ours) is a game called HA HA! The concept is quite simple, everyone is in a circle and going clockwise, you have to say HA HA To the person next to you. For every person, an extra HA is added and if you laugh, you lose. The Khmer have the funniest interpretations of HA HA and never fail to make us lose the game. I know that if I play it and I’m next to one of the Khmer, I won’t win... and I haven’t won yet. Ed is a champion at this game (and splat) and somehow manages to keep a straight face throughout!

We struggled a little bit today as we only had one student turn up. There was a national exam going on which most of the younger students were participating in. We found an extra 3 students but It did impact the session quite a bit, taking it down from 2 hours to an hour. It was also sweltering hot!

As it has just turned the rainy season, a lot of the students have to be at the farm to work and quite a few have been struck by Dengue. Only two more sessions left which is worrying but we feel like we’ve made some kind of impact here, even if it comes in small chunks.