Reaksmey Thy is a co-founder & senior advisor of Organization for Building Community Resources (OBCR), an non-governmental organization implementing rural community development programmes for underserved Cambodian communities.

Passionate to improve socio-economic conditions and opportunities for people across Cambodia, he took part in Cambodia Entrepreneurship Day event in 2020 organized by Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports and the ILO, where he learned about entrepreneurship through the Community-Based Enterprise Development (C-BED) programme.

After the training, he found it interesting and applicable for his organization. Thus, he took initative to implement C-BED as well as Ready for Business (R4B) trainings for micro entrepreneurs between the ages of 18-45, in his community in collaboration with local partners. He found that both C-BED and R4B were highly relevant to rural communities where they have often been left behind.

“I believe C-BED and R4B are very useful tools for entrepreneurs to think how to generate incomes, how to create innovative businesses for community, and how to solve social problems such as the COVID-19 pandemic, in consideration of hybrid enterprise models of on-site and online businesses.”, said Reaksmey Thy.

To accelerate and expand the trainings, Reaksmey worked with local development partners such as Know-how for employment and development (Kfed), Economic Entrepreneurs of Community Innovation (EECI), and Fund for Entrepreneurs Business Inc (FEBI). Together, they are confident that this initiative will help youth entrepreneurs build confidence, leadership and an entrepreneurial mind-set to access market opportunities and create independent ventures for inclusive economic growth in their home community along with hybrid based services.

Reaksmey has started few pilot trainings for his community using online C-BED tools. Ratha Sothun, a youth who joined his training stated, “It is a very good tool to support micro entrepreneurs to gain digital skills and motivate themselves to pursue entrepreneurial business journey in a long run.”

Finally, Reaksmey envisions that OBCR, together with its partners, will deliver the entrepreneurship and soft skills trainings for 15 core groups of Cambodian female and male youth by early 2022 as a part of OBCR objectives to empower rural entrepreneurs under COVID-19 pandemic. Together with the ILO, Reaksmey is paving the way to better and more resilient communities through entrepreneurship and soft skills.

All C-BED training modules are available here.