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Tag: Livelihood Development

When Poverty Becomes a Sin

Banner image: The author (far right) and other trippers visited ethnic minorities in northern Thailand Written by: Janice Cheng (participant of CEDAR’s exposure trip in 2018; church pastor) In December last year, I went to the Thai-Myanmar border with CEDAR to learn about their poverty alleviation projects in the area. The 8-day trip enabled me to understand more about the region. We visited some villages with CEDAR’s local partners and spoke to various individuals during our time there. The residents are mostly ethnic minority groups from the mountainous areas, and they all have their own predicaments to overcome. There are abandoned single mothers and minority groups who have been relocated to the border area in northern Thailand due

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Uprooting Poverty: The Perspective of Christian Faith

Written by: Raymond Kwong (CEDAR’s Chief Executive) and Jady Sit In recent years, the international development sector began to emphasise the importance of human inner transformation for uprooting poverty. For instance, Cornell University Professor Kaushik Basu, who serves as the chief economist of World Bank from 2012 to 2016, shared in a public lecture, that no matter what kind of models of poverty alleviation is, one of the key factors to its success is whether people are willing to let go of some of their own interests or economic benefits and seek higher purposes, with which human being in general are common, and so, he advocates strengthening values education in society. This is about changing hearts and minds.

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Let Indian Voice Their Right to Information: Christian Group Bridges Government and Villagers

Banner image: CEDAR’s partner EFICOR formed and supported the Disaster Management Committees(DMC) in 15 villages of Hasanpur block of India. DMC mmember Mr. Buchi Thakur (centre) is helping women, widows, old people, and people with disability in his village to access pension and other government entitlements When confronting natural disasters, impoverished people are often the most vulnerable group. It is especially difficult for them to cope with disasters due to a lack of resources and knowledge, resulted from limited education. Although public resources are available, they may not be aware of it and do not know how to access. CEDAR’s partner organisation in India has witnessed the difficulties of poor people in obtaining information and government assistance. India,

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The Church Playing a Part in DRR Work is Most Effective and Sustainable

Banner image: A PADR facilitator (first right) is explaining a ploughing method Stanley Enock Hanya is the Coordinator of Church and Community Mobilisation projects at Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe (EFZ), which is one of the biggest evangelical alliances in Zimbabwe. He hopes to equip faith leaders in churches to teach their congregation to facilitate community development based on biblical principles. Written by: Stanley Enock Hanya (Church and Community Mobilisation Coordinator, EFZ) The EFZ embarked on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) after calls for relief from previous project communities that had been affected by 2015/2016 El Niño induced drought. Realising that disaster response was not sustainable, the organisation began to intently look at the word of God for inspiration on issues of disaster prevention. It

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The Answer to Disaster

Written by: Jady Sit Every time there is a disaster, we feel sad and anxious for the suffering victims. While some people would pray for them, others would donate generously or organise a fundraising campaign, and some people would form a volunteer team to serve the devastated survivors through humanitarian work or counselling support. Although we try to give what we can, in the face of a natural disaster, we still feel helpless and powerless, because what could we do to stop tragedies that are not of our control? In 2015, the massive earthquake in Nepal brought irreversible destructions: close to 9,000 casualties, 3.5 million people lost their homes, and Kathmandu Durbar Square, a UNESCO World Heritage Site,

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Will You Make Things Right?

Written by: Jady Sit “Where are you?” “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” “The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” The above scene (Genesis 3:9-12), well-known by every Christian, documents the event when men and God’s relationship went from perfect intimacy to complete distant. As Adam accused “the woman you put here with me”, relationship among humans had also become distorted. Then, men and land were cursed. Sin made the world a broken

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From Desolation to Community

Written and edited by: Jady Sit, Jojo Poon At noon on 25 April 2015, Nepal was hit by the strongest earthquake in 80 years. Countless families lost their loved ones, homes, and properties. Approximately one third of Nepal’s population, 8 million, was affected by the quake. In the midst of ruthless disaster, people responded with love. Shortly after the earthquake, the world quickly pooled their resources to help. Yet, when global news coverage died down and emergency relief phased out, this was when we began to walk with the affected communities, helping them to rebuild and recover their communities sustainably for the long run. In the last decade, CEDAR has been supporting partners’ community development work in mountainous

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This is Community Development

Written and edited by: Jojo Poon I enjoy hearing stories and sharing of different development workers very much. If we put their sharing together, then we would get a complete picture of God’s purposes for the poor and the world. For this issue’s “Taking Action”, we invited CEDAR’s staff from different eras to share about their learnings and experiences along the way to put together a blueprint for CEDAR. “We were in Gansu’s Hui village working on the project… When we conducted home visits, we would ask: ‘Is anyone home?’, and if there were only women in the house, they would answered: ‘No!’” shares Alice, who served in Gansu, China. “We spent half a year to build relationship

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Environmentally Sustainable Development in Thailand

Written by: Jojo Poon What is “development”? What kind of development will lead to better living? In what way will go by contraries? We might be able to find out more from the experience of the farming tribes in Northern Thailand. The aftermath of the Green Revolution The Lahus settled in the mountains in Northern Thailand as a result of a multi-generational search for farmable lands in the areas spanning across Thailand, Myanmar and Laos. They were caught in the Green Revolution[1] in 1960 when the Thai Government encouraged the farmers to focus on growing new types of valuable plants with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that boosted their yields. The Lahus started to homogenize the crops they grow and

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A Passion for Farming – An Interview with Hand the Farmer

Interviewer and Editor: Tsun Wan Yan In Hong Kong, we would often hear someone tell a person to “Go back to farming at your ranch” to tease one’s lack of wit. Now people don’t need to farm at a ranch, nor are they foolish to be a farmer. We found a perfect example of that in Wu Ying Luen, Hand—a young, humorous, and radiating farmer—from the Society for Indigenous Learning (SoIL) in Hong Kong, who differs greatly from our traditional image of a farmer. Hand did not grow up in a farming family, and he was just like any office young adults 4 years ago who would work in front of a computer every day from 9 to

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