Market-based approach to development
WaterSHED is an NGO that is trying to use a business approach to tackle sanitation issues in Cambodia. In a developed country, if you want to buy a toilet you can just go to the shop. However, it is not so simple in Cambodia, especially in rural areas.
Our job is to work with local sanitation businesses to help them develop solutions that they can sell to Cambodian villagers. We work with suppliers, and we also work with local authorities, both in Cambodia and Vietnam.
Social entrepreneurship is very important, because broadly speaking, it is using a business approach to solve a social issue. In many countries you see civil society and the government working to tackle social issues. But that is not enough because there are many complex issues that the government cannot solve, especially when we consider the need for cost effectiveness.
Organisations that take donations and give them away are not cost effective. When we bring social entrepreneurship into the mix, it allows for the implementation of a number of cost effective solutions to solve various problems.
With WaterSHED, for example, we have been working to provide 150,000 latrines in Cambodia and spending much smaller amounts of money to do so than with a donation-based model. Cost effectiveness is a major advantage of this approach. I believe that a lot of other areas can better solve their prob- lems by also using a business approach.
I think getting recognition from Forbes can help inspire more Cambodians to use innovative approaches when thinking about social issues. This is an example for them to see that they can use a business approach, and not just in the private sector but also in the NGO sector.
For WaterSHED, when we first started this programme, people did not believe that we should use a business approach to solve the sanitation problem in Cambodia because they had never tried doing it this way. But after we started implementing these market-based solutions, we saw a big success. I believe that now we can be an example of how a business approach can be used to solve social issues.
In the past several decades, Cambodia really needed the support of aid and international organisations. Now, I would say aid is still important, but we need to look at how we can use more modern and innovative approaches for distributing funding and aid. I think we need to work with the government to help reduce social entrepreneurship costs as well as get people to understand how important it can be for solving the country’s most important issues.
This interview has been edited length and clarity for