Recognizing that threats to forests, wildlife and biodiversity are the most important issues in the eastern landscape of Cambodia. My Village is an NGO that carries out a number of activities to conserve natural resources by empowering indigenous communities such as protected area communities, ethnic women’s networks, and ethnic youth networks.
Project of Youths’ Action for Biodiversity Conservation (YABC) focus on youth participation to increase the capacity for widespread dissemination of forests, wildlife, biodiversity and the environment, especially to local communities effectively.
Through the above issues, My Village Organization organized a training course on: “Reduction of Luxury Wood Furniture Consumption” for 13-school youth in the target area of Mondulkiri province for youths. The purpose of this training is to
– Increase awareness of the benefits of forests and biodiversity
– Raise awareness of the impact of using luxury wood furniture
– Increase the positive attitude of the participants and share it with their friends, family as well as through Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC)
A total of 325 youths (226 women) and 159 indigenous youth (116 women) participated. Through pre-testing the ability of youths, we observed that we provided the training, only about 43 percentage have an understanding of the forest and luxury wood furniture. In contrast, after they received the training from My Village Organization on: “Reduction of Luxury Wood Furniture Consumption”, they can learn more about the forest, as well as the problem of furniture made from luxury wood up to 80 percentage. In addition, they committed to reduce of using the furniture made of luxury wood from day to day, as well as to share the knowledge they gained from this training to share to their families, relatives, friends and the community as much possible. Furthermore, they also gained a lot positive thinking and how to talk about forest issues and luxury wood furniture to their relatives, families, friends and community for reduction of luxury wood consumption and forest and biodiversity conservation. The methods that have been successfully implemented in this training course include group discussion, presentation, Q&A, watching educational videos and role play which can encourage they to reduce shyness or fear to express themselves, especially the performance from role play helped the youths to remember and better understand the relationship between the forest and luxury wood furniture.
***Note: For scoring the test of youth’s ability before and after the training, use the evaluation level of five numbers, the lowest score is represented as number 1 and the highest score is represented as number 5. Thank you!