WHEN IT IS LITERALLY A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
The Smiling Gecko philosophy puts helping people to help themselves first. Yet in rural Cambodia, situations repeatedly arise in which we also provide emergency aid. Because we have to.
The coronavirus crisis, for example, hit the population extremely hard. Increasingly frequent droughts and the resulting crop failures are also a critical problem. Cambodia offers virtually no state support in emergencies, leaving the poorest people to fend for themselves in a struggle they cannot win.
We support people in the region surrounding the campus and in the slums of Phnom Penh. We regularly provide medical supplies and, above all, urgently needed food, much of it produced on our campus. Unlike smallholder farmers, we have professional water pumps and can continue cultivating our land for longer in difficult conditions. This also enables us to distribute drinking water in large clay storage jars.
