As a result of the household survey carried out by our Development Officer from SCOOP, Peter, we discovered that the poorest families in Som Roung did not have access to a toilet. Instead they use open land and this can result in several health problems.
This is one of the biggest community development projects that SCAO has been involved with to date. This project is currently underway through a collaboration of several partner organisations of SCAO; The SCOOP Foundation, Pacha Youth Foundation, and The Gecko Foundation. Through working with IDE Cambodia we established a cheap and effective way of building toilets in the village. IDE Cambodia provided a training course to the local builders in Som Roung on how to construct the toilets.
With this we firstly built two pilot toilets in the village to gain more information on the costs involved. One toilet is shared between two or three families depending on the families’ proximity to the toilet. This is still an on-going project with more toilets being implemented every week thanks to the funding of Pacha Youth Foundation. So far we have implemented two toilets that were funded by Gecko Foundation from Germany. Pacha Youth Foundation from the USA has now stepped in and guaranteed 11 more toilets for the poorest people of the village. As it is now the rainy season in Cambodia, some of the houses that need the toilets the most cannot build the toilets yet. However these toilets that will be built on the Som Roung floodplains will be more expensive because they need to be built higher, as to avoid the flood water. Pacha Youth is also behind this idea. This project is currently on going and you can see more pictures of the toilets on our Facebook page.