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A major transformation is taking shape in Cambodia’s social care system. What started as a grassroots effort to stop children from being put into orphanages is now being scaled nationwide as the blueprint for social protection — thanks to one community model revolutionising the country’s approach to care.

What should a society do when families are unable to care for their children?

For decades, the default answer was orphanages — residential institutions where children without parental care are looked after by staff. However, as evidence mounted that orphanages do more harm than good to children’s well-being, many countries moved beyond the orphanage model, opting instead for foster, family- and community-based systems to house and care for vulnerable children.

In countries with underdeveloped social support systems, though, charity-run orphanages remained a prevailing solution. And in Cambodia, where about one in six people live below the poverty line, families who couldn’t provide their children with adequate food, healthcare, or education turned to orphanages as a last resort. This is why 80% of children living in Cambodian orphanages are not actually orphans, but children whose families felt they couldn’t afford to care for them1.

A care system in crisis
In the early 2010s, Cambodian orphanages came under fire. Emboldened by the growing demand for “orphanage tourism”, it became obvious that many had been abusing and exploiting children for profit.

Orphanage or ‘volontourism’ emerged in the 2000s as an increasingly popular form of tourism in developing countries. Seduced by the promises of white saviourism, wealthy tourists and young international volunteers would visit orphanages for a “feel-good” travel experience, unaware of – or undisturbed by – the fact they were helping to create an “orphan-industrial complex”2.

Between 2005 and 2015, the number of orphanages in Cambodia increased by more than 60%. Children were often “recruited [or] trafficked to fulfil the demand for ‘orphans’”3, and purposefully “kept in poor health, poor conditions and malnourished in order to elicit more support in the form of donations and gifts”. Once supposedly an institution of care for vulnerable children, Cambodian orphanages had become a profit-generating machine, with children the commodity being sold4.

Recognising what had now burgeoned into a full-blown crisis, the Cambodian government made a public commitment in 2017 to shut down all their orphanages and shift to a family- and community-based care model.

However, until recently, those efforts had largely failed. Critics argued that the solution was a cosmetic one: it didn’t address the social realities at the root of why children end up in orphanages in the first place. Forcing their closure with no formal protection system in place to ensure children’s safety going forward meant many would merely return to a life of poverty – putting them at further risk of trafficking, child labour, underage marriage, and other forms of abuse and exploitation5.

But in June 2025, that changed. Inspired by a grassroots social protection initiative developed in the northwestern province of Battambang, the Cambodian government finally took steps to address these root issues when they adopted the Village Hive Model as their national child protection framework.

The model
Kickstarted by Cambodian Children’s Trust (CCT), a local orphanage-turned-NGO, the Village Hive Model offers a groundbreaking framework for a community-led social protection system. The three-tiered, upstream model works to eradicate both poverty and local dependence on charity.

Tier 1: Universal prevention
The foundation of the Hives is the strengthening of public services, like schools and health clinics, to ensure universal access. These essential services raise well-being and living standards for every family in the village.

To prioritise community agency, the programme challenged school and clinic staff to identify their own strengths and needs. CCT’s role then became primarily to supply what they asked for — a non-directive approach rare amongst NGOs.

The Hives invest in public health infrastructure by stocking up on essential supplies, ensuring clean, functioning, and accessible facilities. They provide health workers with additional staff and training opportunities. Local health centres are then better equipped to prevent disease and manage acute and chronic conditions when they arise.

Within schools, the Hives ensure that facilities and curriculums are accessible and of high quality. They provide teachers with additional staffing support, supplies, and training in pedagogy, ICT literacy6, child protection, child rights, and positive behaviour management.

Furthermore, the model provides opportunities for students to participate in extra-curricular activities, life skills classes, remedial tutoring, and more. These efforts create a public school system that helps every child learn and thrive in a safe, nurturing, and stimulating environment.

Together, the strengthening and universalising of these essential services are designed to set children, families, and communities up for success for years to come.

Tier 2: Early intervention
Once basic public services are in place, the Hives’ early intervention scheme attempts to anticipate crises by tackling poverty at its core. Social workers are referred to at-risk families, who they guide through a six-step journey to financial independence.

Outlined in the graph below, that journey starts with conducting a full audit of the family’s basic needs, as well as their monthly income and expenses. This helps connect each family to appropriate public services, design them a financial literacy training and budget, calculate a support payment, and help them set a financial goal.

The social workers then work with families to build a business plan or connect them to employment, and continue monitoring and supporting them to help them reach their goals.

Poverty is a root cause of many issues facing local communities, including family separation, child labour, and trafficking. The support provided to these families equips them with the tools they need to shift their focus from day-to-day survival towards long-term stability. When families gain financial literacy and independence, they become less reliant on charities and are better able to support their children, ultimately decreasing the likelihood of these children falling into exploitative situations.

Tier 3: Crisis response
With prevention and early intervention systems in place, fewer families reach a point of crisis. This means response services are no longer overburdened, allowing them to deliver care more effectively to those in need.

When a crisis does arise, such as reports of abuse, neglect, family separation, child labour, or trafficking, the Hives are equipped with a range of services to address the issue and offer safe alternatives. These include a 24/7 emergency hotline, counselling, crisis housing, kinship care, care leaver support7, family reintegration, addiction support groups, and disaster relief.

When social workers determine that a child can’t safely be cared for by their parents, they work with the extended family network to find other options, prioritising placing the children with family and friends they feel comfortable with before resorting to foster care. They support carers with child protection training and financial support to ensure they are well equipped to provide a safe and nurturing home for the child. They also offer counselling to the child and family to help them work through their challenges.

With this multi-layered and interlocking network of social protection, the Village Hives work to systematically ensure no more children end up in institutional care — providing a blueprint for what truly effective community-based social support can look like8.

Empowering communities
The process of building the Hives began with ‘co-creation workshops’ in each target community. These brought in the voices of local leaders, public servants, and other stakeholders to identify local child protection issues and brainstorm potential solutions. Since this initial ideation, co-design workshops have continued to inform the evolution of the Village Hives.

“I’ve never seen another NGO work like CCT. The Village Hive is as pioneering as the astronauts on the Apollo mission”, said Hak Chanley, Deputy Head of the Cambodian Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans, and Youth (MoSVY). “I saw the commune chiefs, local leaders, government and CCT working so well together. Everyone has the same goal [...], supporting families who have problems until there are none.”

This ability to drive and define their own solutions is one that Cambodian communities have routinely been deprived of. When the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime effectively demolished the country’s care infrastructure in the 1970s, international NGOs stepped in to fill the gaps. Though most of these organisations had good intentions, they created a national care system that depended on foreign charities to deliver essential services.

For decades, this cycle of dependency has deprived locals of empowerment and leadership opportunities, making them reliant on foreign actors to define their issues and prescribe solutions. And sadly, those were rarely rooted in local context and long-term sustainability.

“We want to start a movement to shift power from NGOs back to local communities,” said Pon Jedtha, CCT co-founder and Country Director. “Instead of all the NGOs working in the private sector, which they have full control over, we want to see [them] work within the public sector, using their donations and philanthropy from around the world to invest in building universal public services and trusting communities to do this work.”

CCT’s path towards “breaking the cycle of charity” has not been straightforward. In fact, Pon Jedtha and co-founder Tara Winkler initially developed CCT itself as an orphanage in 2007, before undergoing a restructuring when they realised that most children ending up in their care were not actually orphans. Since then, the organisation has only continued to learn and adapt to what local communities actually need to thrive.

“In 2019, we realised we had hit a dead end. If CCT continued down the same path we were on, Battambang would be dependent on us delivering essential services forever,” said Jedtha. “We deserve a community that can stand on its own and care for its people. Our children, and our children’s children, should grow up knowing the safety of a well-resourced community.”

Working themselves out of a job
This realisation is precisely why one of the organisation’s core tenets is its exit strategy.

It’s a paradox many nonprofits face: if they actually solve the problems they set out to solve, they render themselves redundant. While many organisations shy away from this reality, CCT has made obsolescence central to its mission. As Winkler explains:

“The international development sector was built on a mindset of empire-building, where organisations grow their own brands, programs and infrastructure that they operate privately in parallel to public systems. Shifting to a deeper, more humble focus on solving the root causes of problems in the Global South requires that those same organisations let go of the structures that keep their own names alive.

That’s uncomfortable, because it means losing the ability to stake a claim and say: ‘This is our school, our centre, our program.’ Yet that loss of ownership is precisely the point. When projects blend seamlessly into public systems, the logo may fade, but what remains is far more powerful: a lasting solution owned by the community itself.”

CCT hopes to ‘work themselves out of a job’ by 2032, made redundant by fully functional and self-sustaining Village Hives. This would mean that communities have taken complete charge of their own social protection services, successfully tackling issues as they arise and implementing ongoing, locally driven and informed solutions.

And they’re well on their way. To prioritise localisation, CCT has shifted to a fully Khmer leadership team and implemented an affirmative action policy that ensures equal pay between local and expatriate employees. This policy also stipulates that CCT can only hire expatriates if there is demonstrable proof that their expertise is not available in Cambodia9. As a result, there have been no expat employees at CCT for the past five years.

Since their launch in 2019, the Village Hives have had an enormous impact. According to CCT’s data, families have been shown to increase their income by 142%, reduce their debt by 61%, and continue thriving independently even after completing the early intervention journey10.

As of 2024, the Hives were supporting over 50,000 people across three communes and 18 villages in Battambang province. CCT plans to have the district’s ten communes and 62 villages fully integrated by 2032. And with the model now being adopted by the national government, its scale and impact are only going to keep growing.

“We plan to expand the Village Hive to all 25 Cambodian provinces and the capital city,” explained Siem Sopheak Votey, Family Affairs Director within MoSVY. “We want provincial, commune, and NGO partners to implement [it] together to create one cohesive system to address the root causes of poverty.”

Rebuilding trust
One of the most common concerns about shifting towards a community-based model and integrating the Hives into the public system is about government corruption. In 2024, Cambodia ranked 158 out of 180 countries in the Corruption Perceptions Index, making its corruption issue amongst the worst in the world. Because of this, a lot of foreign trust has been lost in the country’s public institutions.

Sustainable, publicly-integrated Hives require complete trust and cooperation between all its stakeholders. This is why the Hives tackle corruption head-on to rebuild this trust. They’ve implemented strict anti-corruption policies and procedures, requiring regular reporting, training, and discussion forums to evaluate progress and brainstorm solutions11.

“There’s a deeply entrenched idea that communities in the Global South can’t be trusted to run their own affairs. But corruption isn’t an insurmountable problem — it’s not [inherent to] the culture or character of the people. Corruption is simply a symptom of a flawed system,” said Tara Winkler. “We are proving that with the right checks, controls and transparency, we can overcome concerns of corruption.”

These efforts are ongoing, but most participants report that they are already proving effective in ensuring accountability and preventing corruption. Local leaders are also reporting a better functioning relationship between governments and communities.

“[The Village Hive] has promoted inclusivity and encouraged greater engagement between the community and local government,” said Chea Vibol, from Ou Char’s Commune Council. “Local governments have become more responsive to community needs, actively listening to feedback and making fair, impartial decisions that reflect the best interests of our people.”

Funding systems change
While corruption is a major concern, it’s not CCT’s only barrier to securing funding for the Hives. The organisation has found that their project’s complex and long-term nature often confuses donors, who are usually more attracted to clear visions and immediate results.

“Systems change work takes time, and it is not always easy to explain. It was much easier for CCT to raise funds when we were an orphanage!”, Keir Drinnan, Managing Director of CCT Australia – a branch that provides financial and strategic support to the Hives – told me.

As an NGO, CCT has historically mobilised international donors to raise much of the money needed for their projects. However, creating sustainable, publicly-integrated Hives ultimately requires financial backing from the state — and that has often proved difficult to come by. “A lack of understanding by the general public about the upstream approach that CCT is working on”12 can make it challenging to get communities on board and pitch the project to government officials, who might struggle to see the vision the Hive is working towards.

But CCT carries on demonstrating the model’s evidence-based impact. To them, self-sustaining communities where each member receives the care they need to thrive is a vision worth fighting for. And despite initial challenges, the Cambodian government is now contributing their own funding to the project, marking a major step towards the Hives’ sustainability — and CCT’s dissolution.

Globalising localisation?
Localisation is at the heart of the Hives. Their very essence is to be built by Cambodians, for Cambodians. But this doesn’t mean that their community-driven framework is not applicable in other cultural contexts. For CCT, localisation must be the basis of any systems change.

“At its core, localisation should be a matter of power — who is in control and who is making the decisions,” said Winkler. “Power never truly shifts if it remains within the orbit of foreign-controlled NGOs and donors. The only way to create lasting change is to build robust social welfare services within the public system, where the roots of control are inherently local.”

So, while the Hives’ specific characteristics may not work anywhere, its core tenets can.

The Village Hives conceptualise care as a deeply communal, shared responsibility; a process of co-creation and co-evolution. Theirs is a complex, interconnected system of protection which acknowledges that the issues our care systems attempt to fix are mutually inextricable, and thus require a holistic approach.

The model shows that far from a saviour gallantly swooping in to save someone in crisis, effective care systems work outwards from the core. Systems where each member not only has their immediate needs met, but is set up to continue flourishing for decades to come, require the active involvement of communities.

On a global scale, this means communities have power — from the grassroots, village level all the way up to the national policy level. Governments and NGOs need to trust and support them to drive their own change.

And as for each of us, it means we carry a responsibility to ground our practice of care within our own communities, in our daily interactions, as a precondition for building anything else.

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Since the Covid-19 pandemic, countries across Latin America and the Caribbean have been making significant strides when it comes to re-centering, valuing and supporting care. Caregiver-friendly urban innovation, grassroots community initiatives, bold policy commitments, and shifts in economic calculations are reshaping the place of care in many of these societies, providing scalable models for other regions to replicate.

In Bogotá’s “Manzanas del Cuidado”, carers come in for the homemade breakfast, to exercise, file their taxes, or simply for a break and a chat. While she works on the script for a play her and other local mothers are putting on, Natalia Moreno’s elderly mum is over at the cycling session and her son is taking an art class.

There are twenty-five of these ‘Care Apples’ (also referred to as ‘Care Blocs’) in the Colombian capital, with the city planning to reach 45 by 2035. These free public facilities are designed for unpaid caregivers to access a range of activities, services and training programs while the people they care for are attended by staff. Mobile units are dispatched to reach those unable to leave their homes.

Though beneficiaries are primarily women – who in Latin America spend about three times as many hours on unpaid care work as men – the Manzanas also have a “School of Care for Men” as part of their educational component. Practical courses teach men a range of care tasks, and theoretical ones work to dispel the myth that only women can innately care.

Launched in 2020 under the leadership of Diana Rodriguez Franco, the Secretary for Women in then-Bogotá mayor Claudia Lopez’s office, the initiative targets the city’s 1.2 million women who spend their days informally caring for others. According to Colombia’s National Statistics Department, 90% of them are very-low-income, 20% have a chronic illness, and 33% report “never having any free time”1. That means no time to go to the doctor, work out, or see friends. Most of them also never complete high school.

A region-wide trend

The ‘Manzanas del Cuidado’ initiative is part of Bogotá’s participatory care system, which coordinates care provision to the city’s households between the state, the district, the private sector and civil society. It’s far from an outlier: in the last few years, cities like Buenos Aires, Santiago, Monterrey, Quito, Panama City and others have set up their own innovative local frameworks to support caregivers.

In Brazil, Belém’s Municipal Care Policy supports the ‘Ver-o-Cuidado’ project, through which public officials and civil society leaders are trained in care policy design and advocacy. Hundreds of paid and unpaid female caregivers have also received guidance to better understand their rights, defend the value of their work, and demand better care policies. The training has since been expanded to a national e-learning platform.

In Mexico City, intergenerational centres known as “Utopias” (Unidades de Transformación y Organización Para la Inclusión y la Armonía Social, or Units of Transformation and Organization for Inclusion and Social Harmony) bring together swimming pools, sports grounds, children’s play areas, and free activities for the elderly – which include dance classes, massages, aromatherapy, and martial arts.

Piloted by visionary mayor Clara Brugada in Iztapalapa, one of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, the Utopias have reportedly already brought down serious offences like assault, robbery and murder by 25 to 74 percent depending on the area.

While these innovations are not all new – Uruguay’s National Integrated Care System (SNIC) has been operational for over a decade – they are part of a wider regional trend that picked up in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Societies often experience a renewed need for social support and community ties in the wake of an economic crisis: but Covid highlighted more blatantly than ever the chronic lack of recognition and grossly uneven distribution of care, as well as the inadequacy of public infrastructure.

In Latin America, the pandemic set women’s labour market participation 10 years back as majority-women service jobs in tourism, hospitality and paid domestic work were particularly impacted by the crisis. Many struggled to return to work even after restrictions were lifted. They often faced choices not uncommon to women across the region who struggle to provide for their families: the informal economy – picking up odd jobs or selling cigarettes on the street – prostitution, or becoming drug mules for the cartels.

This reality compounded an already precarious situation marked by population ageing, the worsening impacts of climate change, and mounting political tensions over the harshness of life under neoliberalism. A wave of protests swept countries like Nicaragua (2018), Chile (2019), Colombia (2021), and Cuba (2021) during this period, some of which were violently repressed.

The combination of these various crises laid bare the need for a bold approach to care as a strategic investment in social justice and development. Rather than taking surface-level steps to appease specific interest groups, many Latin American countries began redesigning entire economies around care as essential public infrastructure.

Significant progress has been made since then. To point to just a few national examples, Panama’s 2024 care law created new diplomas to better recognise skills in eldercare and disability care; Colombia and Chile’s new care systems are already estimated to contribute 19.6 percent and 25.6 percent of their respective economies. Meanwhile, Mexico and Peru are promisingly moving towards embedding their own comprehensive frameworks into law.

The essential role of grassroots activism

Particularly crucial to these policies’ effectiveness and revolutionary nature is the fact that many of them were developed with genuine input from civil society. Chile Cuida, Chile’s ambitious project for a new care-forward constitution, was the product of a large-scale public consultation conducted in 2023 by a specially created Constituent Assembly2.

More than twelve thousand people – 80 percent of them women – shared their lived experiences, helping tailor Chile Cuida to their specific struggles and needs. The process was also enriched by the tight collaboration between public officials and grassroots organisations like APañales, a network supporting caregivers in vulnerable communities.

Similarly, Belém’s municipal care policy was developed in conjunction with the Belém Care Activist Network, which brings together thirteen feminist organisations who have spent decades laying the seeds of this change.

“The biggest shift has been putting care at the centre of public policy, not just academic debates”, said Virginia Gontijo, programme lead for UN Women Brazil. “For the first time, care policy in Brazil is being shaped with full participation from both government and civil society.”3

Persistent obstacles

The region is, of course, not homogenous in its outlook on care. There are 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and only 17 are actively building transformative care systems4 – each within its particular political, social and economic situation.

Entrenched gender norms and powerful religious institutions can delay progress on policies seen to disrupt the traditional family structure: most Latin American countries, for example, still provide less than 10 days’ statutory paternity leave.

Right-wing electoral victories are also threatening to reverse the last few years’ advances, as ambitious care policies become prime targets for neoliberal cost-cutting. In the two years since his election, hard-right libertarian Javier Milei has killed or cut back 47 out of Argentina’s 50 care provisions – including various childcare benefits, pensions for the elderly, and food stamps. Fifty ‘Community Care and Support Centres’ for people struggling with substance abuse have also been closed.

The region’s persistent security challenges mean that care is often a variable in the push-and-pull between short-term repressive frameworks and long-term, prevention-based approaches to tackling organised crime. It takes exceptional leadership to navigate this delicate balance, like that of Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, who has so far managed to hold firm on both a bold care strategy and a strong stance on cartel violence.

Her administration is betting on a ‘third way’ between the equally ineffective strategies of two of her predecessors – Felipe Calderón’s ‘War on Drugs’ and Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s ‘hugs, not bullets’. Though recent assassinations are testing Sheinbaum’s stance, preliminary results showing a 32% drop in the country’s murder rate could make for convincing evidence that being both generous on care and ‘tough on crime’ is, in fact, possible.

Care-forward institutional leadership

The new ambitious tone on care echoes at the very top. In March 2025, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) launched a new initiative called “IDB Cares” to better structure and fund the development of care infrastructure across the region, stating that “care is the foundation of thriving societies and economies”. Last August, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights became the first international tribunal to recognise the right to care – which includes giving care, receiving care and caring for oneself – as an autonomous human right.

One regional institution in particular has been consistently pushing for a more holistic understanding of care: the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). In 2022, at the commission’s 15th Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, member states adopted the Buenos Aires commitment, placing care at the center of the region’s socio-economic agenda.

Last August, at the most recent conference, the Tlatelolco commitment established a Decade of Action (2025-2035) to build a “care society”. ECLAC defines it as such:

“A profound transformation in the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of development, recognising the role of care in sustaining life and the planet, acknowledging eco-dependence (human dependence on nature), interdependence among people, and care as a necessity, an essential job, and a right.”5

Their 175-page proposal draws on the likes of Joan Tronto, Judith Butler and the Indigenous ‘Buen Vivir’ social philosophy, which defends “community-centric, ecologically balanced and culturally sensitive” modes of living.

In genuinely quite radical language for an international economic institution, ECLAC recognises that “vulnerability is intrinsic to the human condition” — going beyond the limited understanding that people need care only at particular moments of their life. The commission positions the care society as “an alternative to extractive economies that dispossess indigenous land and livelihoods and lead to an increase in violence.”

Playing catch-up

These institutional commitments matter. While many have diagnosed the UN’s normative positioning with terminal irrelevance, the ability of rights-based frameworks to act as vectors for change is not to be entirely discounted.

First, because care-forward economic restructuring can be “a strategic entry point for advancing feminist principles in policy negotiations, as the topic of care in general is sometimes less contentious than other topics related to gender equality.”6 In a time where many other rights are threatened, and states like Sweden and Canada are reneging on their feminist foreign policy (FFP) commitments, care is a good way to keep building coalitions around frameworks that directly improve women’s lives while losing nothing of their political strength and explicit feminist nature.

Second, because Latin American countries are creating essential blueprints and dragging others along with them. Just last month, the EU and sixteen countries of Latin America and the Caribbean agreed to an ‘EU-LAC Bi-regional Pact on Care’, which “builds on the momentum of key regional and multilateral commitments that call for care work to be recognised, valued, and fairly distributed at the global level”.

This twists on its head the linear story Global North countries like to tell themselves – and everybody else – about development. When it comes to care policy, the Global North is playing catch-up. Far from centering vulnerability and interdependence, leaders in the West are still confining care to a narrow, compartmentalised and largely health-based understanding.

A global moment

This cross-pollination from Latin American countries outwards mirrors the one underway at the local level: initiatives like the Manzanas del Cuidado and Utopias are being piloted in cities around the world. As Manuel de Araújo, mayor of Quelimane (Mozambique) put it: “It’s an idea that is replicable not just from Addis Ababa to Maputo, but in London and Bristol.”

It’s now up to us to take those blueprints and replicate them in our own countries, our own cities, our own communities. To bring forth a truly wholesale understanding of care as a right, a public good, a structuring principle of social life, and a central concern of political decision-making.

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If you want to partner with or write for the Institute, reach out to Mélina Magdelénat at melina@fifthwaveinstitute.com.