Right to Relief

Boeung Pram community is located in Battambang province, where community members began to live and grow crops in the 1990s. Previously located in Ampil Pram Deum commune, the area is now Boeung Pram commune. Community membes primarily rely on farming and migration to make a living, although chronic droughts and debt issues have led to a decline in incomes.

Starting in 2005, hundreds of new residents from different provinces began settling in the area, led by a man who would later become the local commune chief. The land disputes caused by this settling culminated in violent clashes in 2011, when community members’ crops and houses were destroyed, several people were injured, and a woman was left dead. In 2012, land titles were distributed to some residents, but 192 community members have not yet received land titles or any adequate compensation. The community has continued to petition local and national authorities for a proper solution, and after receiving a letter from the Senate in 2014, many community members can farm on their land while they wait for a more permanent resolution to their conflict.

About 80% of families in Boeung Pram have a loan from an MFI, and many of those are group loans. Many families do not have land titles due to their land conflict, and this makes it difficult to get individual MFI loans. In one case, a community member had 3 different MFIs deny her an individual loan because she did not have a land title, and instead would only offer her a group loan. But despite this, and despite having smaller loan sizes than many other communities in Cambodia, borrowers in the community still reported facing threats, coerced land sales, eating less food, and migrating in order to repay MFI loans. Children have been taken out of school and sent to work, either in different provinces or in Thailand, in order to make more money to help pay off debts, and community members reported feeling shame, sadness and fear about their levels of microfinance debt.

• In one case, a CO put a “for sale” sign up at a borrower’s house after they were two days late on a repayment.
• In another case, a borrower who borrowed about $750 was late on repayments because his farming was not going well. The MFI seized his land without using the legal system.

• Community members reported eating less food, and some that had previously been able to afford fish regularly can now only eat rice with prahok (fermented fish paste) for several days straight.

The Right to Relief

Microloan providers and their international investors, including many of Europe’s and the United States’ largest development banks, have a moral obligation to address human rights abuses and provide proper remedy and redress. Cambodian borrowers must have the right to relief, or else they will continue to face debt-driven hunger, child labour, migration, coerced land sales, and many other human rights abuses raised as part of this project.

Research Background

Who We Are

Equitable Cambodia (EC) and the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO) are human rights NGOs registered in Cambodia. Both organisations are dedicated to amplifying the voices of grassroots communities and highlighting human rights abuses perpetrated by private and public actors in Cambodia.

What We Did

This project is based on the principles of community-based research, where community members play an active role in producing knowledge and act as co-researchers. Information was gathered from both focus-group discussions with community members as well as individual interviews. All the information in this report comes from discussions with community members and was verified with community representatives. This project is not meant as the only true source of information about microloans, but rather is meant to accurately reflect the lived experiences of community members. Many of these issues have been raised before in previous reports issued by human rights NGOs in Cambodia.

Why We Did It

Many Cambodians are drowning in microloan debt, which is leading to drastic and serious human rights violations across the country, and many people are suffering in silence. To quote one community representative who participated in this project: “I’m happy that our sadness is finally being publicised. We have kept it hidden for so long. The way [the MFIs] act is the opposite of the way they speak. Debt is the biggest problem faced by communities across the country.”

Publications