SLS-8d2d Community Impact Study - Cambodia - Challenges and Lessons Learned

During the 5 years of study in San Sok, lessons were learned, projects evolved from addressing immediate needs to capacity building for the future. To summarise the lessons:

1. Understand the community - It took quite a long time, many discussions, patient build up of trust and not a little self-discovery to figure out and prioritise the concerns and needs of the community. 
2. Build Up Relationship - Capacity building is a long term endeavour.  Initial skepticism and hesitancy have to be overcome by gaining mutual understanding and trust.  
3. Involve the Community - Success of all projects, particularly capacity building, depends on the community taking ownership.  We learned through failure of some of our initial projects because we neglected to draw the community into taking ownership. 
4. Multidisciplinary Team - No one single discipline can cover all of community assessment, information/computer technology, youth training, teacher training, social design, graphics/multimedia design, …
5. Be sensitive to Local Culture - The local culture and tradition of shared common property led directly to the design of the solar panel electrical power system - from one set of panels for each family to a public charging station shared by multiple families - resulting in much higher efficiency and saving of material and costs overall. 
6. Empower the community, Not only to build things - Training the community to contribute to building and maintaining the system is harder than doing everything ourselves.  But it enhances the possibility of ultimate success and longer term sustainability.  

These results were published in the following conference paper: Kenneth W. K. Lo, Stephen C. F. Chan & Grace Ngai. “Capacity Building and Development for a Local Community through Engineering Service-Learning Projects – A 5-year study in Rural Cambodia”, IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC 2018), October 18-21, 2018, San Jose, California, USA.  

In the process, many of our staff (Kenneth, Kin, Jessie, Wing, Cindy, Artemis, Eugene,  Sean, KP, Wai, Jeice, …, in fact, the whole office) have learned, grown, matured, … - directly or indirectly.  Kenneth, in particular, has become our “Old Cambodia Hand”, who has been to Cambodia 20+ times, conducting reconnaissance, making connections,  creating new projects, preparing for projects, purchasing equipment and material, supervising projects, researching, …  He has also leveraged his vast experience into the role of a “chief of operations” of many more projects not only in Cambodia, but also in Hong Kong, Rwanda, …  We are so grateful to Cambodia as a wonderful training ground for our team.