About CEP
What is CEP?
CEP: Cambodia Empowerment Project
Empowerment has a meaning that it can give individuals dreams and hopes, and encourage them to maximize their talents and potential in order to pursue dreams and hopes toward the future.
Everyone is born with wonderful and unique potentials. And all should have the right continuously to show such specialties during the life. Empowerment means a power to draw individual’s talent and potential from himself/herself as if water continues to gush out from a spring.
The remarkable economic growth has continued recent years in Cambodia. Thanks to the growth, some people mainly in the capital city have become richer, but on the other hand, 46% of the Cambodian people live in unprivileged villages and struggle with poverty yet.
In spite of the fact that the country has received stuff from outside the country over 20 years after a civil war, why Cambodia has not overcome poverty and been in one of the least developed countries?
We think there are three key factors as below.
- One third of people, some of who were intelligentsia, were slaughtered or died of famine under Pol Pot Resume and the 8-year lasted civil war, and as a result, the country lost unique culture and traditions
- Under the spreading global economy, foreign capitals have dominated the Cambodian market, and the government has failed to grow its domestic companies and industries
- Materialism and mammonism have been rampant in the country during the cumulative economic development with the inflow of foreign capitals
What is worse, we feel that bad aspects of material and monetary supports from outside have prevented citizens from raising own skills to, by themselves, solve problems and issues, and to yield specialties by making the best use of culture, traditions, and fertile land.
Based on the fact shown above, we think that we should convert material supports which have been provided into supports which specialized in mental and spiritual cultivation. Cambodia is one of the largest countries, which people naturally have Buddhist beliefs in their daily life, so we decide to provide supports based on Buddhist principles in order to solve problems and issues we discussed above.
Promoting our projects with Cambodians, we also find that we can learn, vice versa, a lot from their relaxed lifestyles and artless kindness, which Cambodian have had yet but Japanese and those who live in capitalism have left as modern capitalism and global economy has spread. We notice the possibilities that these manners will help reducing mental devastation, increasing income gaps, and environmental destruction, all which have been getting widespread in our societies.
We provide the Mental Cultivating Project to aim at four goals as below, not by unilateral supports but by collaborative supports with local people.
- Nurture sympathy and compassion for children through picture stories and paper books based on Buddhist narratives
- Muse with Cambodians what is genuine happiness and enables them to feel one, which is not accompanied by money or substance
- Reevaluate original culture and traditions in Cambodia, and grow postures to hand goodness down to next generations
- Nurture skills to determine what is problems and issues in Cambodia, and raise minds to tackle them by Cambodians
In addition, we also provide the Economic Support Project as below in order to revitalize the provincial economies which cannot have kept pace with the economic growth in Phnom Penh, the capital city in Cambodia.
- Launch projects to support start-up of sustainable and eco-friendly businesses which make use of resources in each area and which can increase basic incomes for local people
- Nurture next generations through projects who will take charge of the country
- Construct management systems that local people alone will be able to manage projects by themselves
- Grope with local people for what is genuine sustainable development
- Support local people to create hopeful societies toward the future without any exploitation