Abstract
The poor and vulnerable in rural areas of Cambodia face a pattern of risks from natural disaster that poses an increasing threat to their livelihoods. One third of the past 3 years has been taken up either with flooding or with drought with the drought periods were more prolonged than the floods. The damage caused by flood and drought was comparable, although the flood of 2011 was the most extensive of the disasters. This chapter illuminates the impact of disasters and the social protection interventions on household welfare. It addresses the entitlement failure of poor and vulnerable people suffering from the impacts of flood and drought. We suggest designing community-level social protection interventions to emphasize ex-ante instruments rather than the ex post response to natural disasters through emergency assistance and relief. Cash transfers programs provide direct assistance in the form of cash to the poor. Ex-ante cash transfer programs can play a crucial role in encouraging poor households to invest in business rather than spending on food. Microfinance schemes can also help ex-ante income diversification that can bolster households against widespread natural disasters.
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- 1.
ID-Poor Database, an almost nationwide database of the “Identification of Poor Household Program” which divided the livelihood of people into three categories (very poor or ID-Poor I, poor or ID-Poor II, and non-poor) based on a set of proxy mean tests of household properties.
- 2.
CSES (Cambodian Socio-Economic Survey), last conducted in 2009, is a nationwide representative sample of 12,000 households focusing on livelihood and socio-economic characteristic at household level.
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© 2015 Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA)
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Vathana, S., Oum, S., Kan, P., Chervier, C. (2015). The Role of Community Social Protection in Natural Disaster Risk Management in Cambodia. In: Aldrich, D., Oum, S., Sawada, Y. (eds) Resilience and Recovery in Asian Disasters. Risk, Governance and Society, vol 18. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55022-8_3
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