Rising Voices Grantee Project Update
After six months, the Empowering Cloghers Project (“the Project”) has come to its conclusion with the Clogher Corner in November 2014, an event where more than forty bloggers and social media users attended the event. This is one of the greatest gathering of the bloggers given that we often communicate via online rather than physical meetings in a larger group. This opportunity to see such a wide range of people with blogs was a great way of inspiring new Cloghers to keep on blogging.
While the purpose of Clogher Corner was not only for the gathering of the bloggers and social media users but also to introduce the new Cloghers who just finished all the training and start blogging themselves to the community as well. In addition, this event was organized to honour the three winners of the blog competition which organized among the participants of the project to test their blogging skills and to evaluate the training impact.
Before the Clogher Corner, a group of three committee members came together and evaluated the blog posts that submitted to the blog competition. All comments were collected and transferred to the applicants before the opening of Clogher Corner.
The participants were able to congratulate three award recipients. The first place went to Ms. Sum Dany, for her blog post on the situation of factory workers. Second place went to Ms. Chroeng Sopheakvirya for her blog post about education and children and third place went to Ms. Cheng Sreymom for her blog post about protecting the environment. In addition, the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR) congratulated our first award recipient Sum Dany for being selected as one of the awardees of VXW, Ending Violence against Women through Innovations in Mobile Technology, organized by The Asia Foundation in cooperation with Golden Gekko and Sabay Digital Corporation.
Clogher Corner concluded our 6 month-project that was able to empower these female from rural communities to be able to express their impression in a safer and larger space. The Clogher Corner also inspired the participants who completed all the trainings provided by the Project to continue blogging and keep engaging with other bloggers.
Blogging used to be very popular in Cambodia, however, most of the blogs were not focused on the social issues or issues consider to be very sensitive, which might lead to the writer to be in danger. However, blogs are a very easy and useful platform for Cambodian people to express themselves on the issues that bother them and it is more important while mainstream media in Cambodia is heavily restricted.
The most important aspect of the project was that even though there were some challenges and there were participants who dropped out during the project period, but there were participants who still committed to continue publishing their blog posts.
For more photos of the Clogher Corner please visit the CCHR Facebook Album.