CHOICE is building a honey production facility to house our Honey Producer’s Cooperative. This facility will also offer training and turnkey project development for other NGO’s desiring to practice beekeeping for poverty alleviation.
CHOICE currently provides support in three main areas, each of these is broken into many parts:
1. Medical/Health for adults and children.
We take sick people to Hospital and pay their costs for food, transport and sometimes their Medicine and Hospitalization, Birth control, Vaccinations, Safe water deliveries, Formula milk, Mosquito nets and more.
2. Education/Vocational Training for children.
We Transport children to and from Government school, at our center we provide English and German Language lessons, Kindergarten, Computer classes, Health and Hygene, Sewing, Hairdressing, Gardening, Sport, all uniforms and education materials are supplied free of charge. In Phnom Penh city we provide University Scholarships and Apprenticeships, we provide for all their accommodation food allowances etc.
3. Family Assistance for all in our Villages.
The elderly, some deserted mothers and those that are suffering illness often need special support, it may be providing rice, paying for medical expenses, medicine or transporting them to and from the facility that help. Sometimes we can find work for individuals or families, we often deliver free footwear, clothing and other items.
CHOICE Cambodia is a Non-Profit organization (NPO), founded by expatriates in 2006. Registered in England and Wales No. 1140909, and in Cambodia as an NGO and has registered support branch’s in Germany and Australia. The team all volunteers and most living in Phnom Penh strive to make a difference to the extremely poor and disadvantaged people of Cambodia. We classify the extreme poor as those Khmers who are homeless, or have no land, jobs and no adequate health-care, they do not have the resources to provide for themselves. The organization is also committed to addressing the plight of children. Those who are orphaned, abused, and those homeless children whose parents can no longer care for them. We are driven by a very strong commitment to keep families together. We provide extra support to the parents of children, rather than allow poverty to separate the children from the family.
The Trustees of CHOICE are totally committed to a 100% transparency and run by a 100% Volunteer policy. All financial records are always available to donors for inspection. We need your financial help and support and if you are visiting Cambodia and in Phnom Penh, please join us on one of our trips, or volunteer to help with our daily water deliveries, we need volunteer teachers, kindergarten assistance or IT teachers at our Center preferably for the long term.
In order to secure the future of the organisation and the activities listed above by the purchase of land it has been decided to add services for mature age students in need of a livelihood that does not exploit them, where they can be responsible for themselves, and grow their own business within the framework of a cooperative that will offer mentoring, extension, and marketing services.
A dedicated facility for training in beekeeping, improved poultry husbandry and small scale aquaculture is in the process of construction at Kampong Svay, 25 km south of Phnom Penh.
We need your help to make it a reality. The land has already been purchased and infrastructure works are underway.Our Staff are now receiving training in Beekeeping at an advanced level.
The property will be home to a school of non resident students K-12 which has been in operation a number of years already.
A great deal of interest is now being shown in keeping bees in Cambodia due to the tremendous success of this industry in Vietnam, which has identical ecological conditions to some provinces in Cambodia and the very high price ( circa USD 20/kg ) of pure natural honey in local markets.
Generally, most of the honey available in Cambodia is from wild sources gathered from Apis cerana, florea, and dorsata bees, native to the region.
The product is gathered by honey hunters in an unsustainable way and is heavily adulterated with water and palm sugar.
While some attempts at culture of Apis dorsata have been made, this species is not very amenable to management due to it’s migratory nature.
The European honey bee, Apis mellifera and it’s subspecies are very well adapted to tropical Asia with appropriate terrain, floral sources, and the ability to move the bees seasonally.
One of our associates has built up 90 hives in a period of only 14 months that are thriving and producing surplus, The range of expected surplus for an average well managed colony can be expected to be circa 50 KG per annuum.
This all sounds very attractive, but there are many constraints at this early juncture which we are attempting to address in a prioritised fashion:
-By fostering bee keeping as a lucrative livelihood for a large number of landless and economically deprived people, a financial incentive to preserve and restore the native flora can be clearly demonstrated and a clear economic case can be demonstrated at grass roots level. Given the example of the industry in Vietnam, Apiculture can be shown to be a potentially important export industry, with clear benefits to the practitioners and the economy as a whole.
–A major constraint is the lack of hardware available to practise apiculture in Cambodia. Many of the simple components such as hive bodies, bottoms, and lids can easily be fabricated locally providing a source of employment at a competitive price.
Other requirements can be cheaply imported from Vietnam, and one of our members already engages in this business; we are in the process of making equipment available nation wide on this site
–Training has until now been lacking with only a few sporadic and unsustained efforts by NGO’s to introduce Apiculture locally. We offer 1 day courses in both Khmer and English at very reasonable prices. Ignorance of suitable honey flora is also an issue with some of the previous attempts at introducing colonies into rice paddy areas and no provision to move the stocks onto suitable honey flora resulting in 100% dead out of stocks.
– Suitable stocks– until recently there were very few colonies of Apis mellifera present in Cambodia. Now there are sufficient colonies present with stock for sale that have some local adaptation having passed through Thailand and Vietnam, thus producing a degree of adaptation to local conditions.
–Pathogens– Varroa is endemic to Cambodia, along with Nosema. While AFB and EFB are so far unreported, it can be expected that both are present. Knowledge of how to treat these problems, and the remedies will be addressed in training programs.
–Finance–
We need your financial help to provide the infrastructure to build the facility.