Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Meeting with AED coordinator

On Monday 19, 2008 I and Mr. Kin Mengse met Mrs. Cecile Lantican (Phd) at the office of AED Phnom Penh, she a new AI-BCC Country Coordinator for Academy for Educational Development in Cambodia. Generally, we met and talked about the progress of AIBC3, where we are if compare to the project’s objective. So, each of the project’s output in the project document was reviewed one by one.

After discussion on those points, we have talked about the financial report of the project, based on the information from Cecile, she told us the fiscal year of USAID as it is based on the system of USA calendar, it will be conducted around September or October so she requested us to complete the activity by August 2008 and the financial report need to be done as fast as possible so that she has enough time for the preparation to USAID.

In addition to the project’s impact, she prefers to go with us, on May 26, to observe the training session that our staff will organize in the field and she also plan to meet several good farmers to see the progress of innovation practice, ECR. We plan to bring her to Takeo province. Furthermore, AED planed to provide our staff and FAO’s staff the training on the inter-personal skill as Mrs. Berengere DeNegri (the previous AED country coordinator) used to discuss with us about that. They suggest us to select a few master trainers among our all field trainers to receive the training that can be possibly organized between 1-7 July and the training for whole staff will be held on 8-9 July.

I am wondering whether AIBC4 can be implemented or not meanwhile AED seems to have no budget to cover for the next phase. According to the result of our discussion, we see that we are working well on the previous target provinces (in phase 1 and phase 2), many activities were done, but in case of new target provinces, we have approximately have achieved around 20-30% as we have just completed the commune workshop, selection of village promoter, provide training to village promoter on AI, and some VPs are now organizing the training to villagers. Among the whole new VPs, some of them are not operating. Afterward, it is better to conduct the training on poultry disease and its prevention in June and there will be an end-evaluation at the end of the project.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Field visit to ALP Modulkiri

From 21-24 July 2008, I had been at Sok San commune, Koh Ngek district of Modulkiri province to conduct the field monitoring support for the project, namely ALP "Agriculture Livelihood Project". During the visit, I have reviewed the activity plan of the project as well as the project output that we have achieved so far. Generally, i could see that the project has achieved as planed, excepted one activity, called "village general meeting to share agriculture innovation" we have done one meeting out of 4 expected meetings.

Furthermore, we see that there are now 4 farmers have applied SRI experiment and there will be around other 20 farmers are interested to apply SRI in case of they have enough raining water in the field. Some other agriculture innovations like vegetable growing, ecological chicken raising have been conducted by several farmers. During the visit, i have also discussed with the project staff on the overview of the project's progress in term of activities and output-based. Additionally, we have also consulted to anticipate about the next quarterly activity plan and expected output. It is to note that most of farmers have not yet transplanted their rice because they have no enough water for transplanting. There will be more farmers apply SRI while they have water. Recently, we observed that farmers are busy to plow their rice field as the rain started.