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'Seth Koma': a child rights success story in Cambodia

As the plane carrying our group of UNICEF communications staff landed in Phnom Penh in the first week of February, we wondered just how we could get a feel for the country in three short days. We also wondered about the mosquitoes.

We were a mixed bunch, hailing from places as far-flung as Paris, Prague and Wellington. As media people, we were the link between a global child rights agency and our domestic publics in the developed world that increasingly demand to know where their aid dollars go. It was our mission to get up close and personal with UNICEF's work for child rights in the field.

We headed into the countryside to Svay Rieng province on the Vietnam border, where we could see in practical terms how overseas aid today has shifted from the '70s notion of providing handouts to children with runny noses to an innovative UNICEF community action programme for child rights. Known as Seth Koma (child rights) the programme has been enthusiastically taken up by over 700 villages in five provinces across Cambodia.

As we bumped through clouds of dust along pot-holed roads, it was impossible not to be reminded of Cambodia's tragic history; the dry rice paddies we passed were once Pol Pot's dreaded killing fields and the road we now travelled used to be heavily mined. Thirty years of conflict had left the country crushed, with young people particularly hard hit. Today's Cambodian children are among the poorest in the world, while infant and child mortality is the highest in south east Asia.

We were welcomed to each Seth Koma village we visited by throngs of curious children, and women bearing fresh coconuts jammed with drinking straws. A tiny girl who looked four years old was actually eight, we were told, stark evidence of stunting caused by lack of nutritious food. There were no visible sources of fresh water, just a fetid green pond in one village where a large pig snuffled contentedly. And many villagers lacked even the most basic service of all, proper latrines.

Dealing with fundamental problems

It was fundamentals like these - reducing malnutrition, providing clean water, improving sanitation - that lay at the heart of the Seth Koma programme. UNICEF, together with local partners and the backing of local authorities, was training villagers to identify their problems, come up with solutions and put these solutions into practice.

Progress was slow but the results spoke for themselves. In one village we saw a well providing 10 families with clean water. Supported by UNICEF, the well was maintained by a member of the community. In another, a trained health worker came every day to teach young mothers how to care properly for their babies. We saw women attending a village adult literacy class. We visited a health centre, which relied on a system of community 'feedback committees' to link the centre into the 12 villages it served.

As we moved on to the primary school, where girls had achieved a pass rate of 91 per cent last year, it was all starting to make sense. Seth Koma was making a visible difference in protecting the rights of children and women, while improving their lives through a participatory approach linked with village development. Seth Koma was empowering communities to build better lives for their children.

Since the Seth Koma programme began in Cambodia five years ago, malnutrition had been cut from 60 per cent to 49 per cent in those villages where it operated. Fewer cases of diarrhoea were reported, more villages had access to safe drinking water, and the rate of child immunisation in Svay Rieng was at 90 per cent compared to 40 per cent nationally.

In three short days, our group had been thrust into a very practical application of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which underpins all UNICEF's work. Local communities operated all the programmes we visited in Svay Rieng. UNICEF had set up these programmes and been responsible for their initiation and much of the training and early finance but they were now self-supporting.

We felt confident we could return home with good news for our various donor publics: their money was being put to good use in Cambodia. And as for the mosquitoes - Cambodia was so fascinating we barely noticed them.