Together Saving Lives & Building Futures

I am Sébastien Marot, Founder and Executive Director of Friends-International.

I started Friends in 1994, when, passing through Cambodia’s capital, I stumbled across dozens of children sleeping on the streets. I decided to change my life, and, 25 years on, have led Friends to become an award-winning social enterprise, delivering innovative, replicable protection and reintegration services for over 84,000 marginalized children and families across Southeast Asia each year.

Knowing that you cannot achieve the impact needed to protect and empower every child to build their future alone, I founded our ChildSafe Alliance, a partnership of NGOs and Government services, and the ChildSafe Movement, which informs and influences all societal actors - from tourists to businesses - to protect children from harm, reaching millions and catalyzing policy change.

Today, COVID-19 has changed everything, and we must work fast to ensure marginalized children and families are not left behind as we rebuild.

COVID-19 has decimated social, economic and development gains globally and the lasting socio-economic impacts are expected to be most damaging for children, and in particular, children from marginalized communities. Friends is committed to ensuring that they are not left behind as countries rebuild and work towards the SDGs, but rather, are placed at the center of these efforts.

With Elevate’s support, we have the right team, expertise and capacity for innovation to adapt our social businesses and programs to ensure that marginalized children, youth and families are protected and able to build sustainable futures through our holistic ecosystem of protection and reintegration services, scaling our impact through partner replication and cross-sector collaboration. Recognizing that this crisis impacts every child, everywhere, we will mobilize an international community through our ChildSafe Movement with information and actions they can take to protect children and ensure their wellbeing in the new global context.

“Children are not the face of this pandemic, but they risk being among its biggest victims [and] its effects are expected to be most damaging for children in the poorest households”; this was the stark warning from the UN in April. COVID-19 is impacting all children, everywhere, putting their safety, rights and development at risk. 66 million children could fall into extreme poverty in 2020 and 1.5 billion children are out of school. Online learning platforms are failing to reach the most marginalized, and even for those with internet access, there are increased risks of exposure to online predators and inappropriate content. Lockdown and school closures put children at heightened risk of witnessing and suffering abuse.    

Sadly, Friends is seeing these predictions playing out in the communities we work in across Southeast Asia, with an observable growth in the number of children and youth turning to dangerous ways of earning money such as prostitution. A May 2020 survey by one of our Cambodian partners found that 77% of families’ income had dropped by more than half, and 13% of families had put their children to work to compensate for loss of income. 16% reported increased violence at home.

Friends’ mission is to build a future where all children are safe from abuse and are empowered to become productive citizens who can contribute to a more equitable, sustainable world.  Today, the impacts of COVID-19 bring a renewed urgency to this goal. With Elevate’s support, we will:

1. Adapt our services to save lives and build futures for marginalized children, youth and their families, developing and testing new solutions to respond to the changing socio-economic context. This will include: supporting SDG4 by adapting our remedial education for out-of-school children and scaling up our efforts to reintegrate them into public school; adapting our award-winning vocational training businesses, which provide training and decent work (SDG8) for vulnerable youth and caregivers, to new market realities, ensuring we can continue to provide market-aligned skills which allow graduates to gain safe employment and income for them and their families.

2. Scale effective solutions through replication by our ChildSafe Alliance partners.

3. Mobilize a global community through our ChildSafe Movement with information and actions they can take individually and collectively to protect children and support their wellbeing in the new global context, including staying safe online and what to do if abuse is suspected.

Friends works with marginalized children, youth and their caregivers in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Indonesia, and across Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe through partnerships, in communities with high incidence of poverty and marginalization. We provide a holistic continuum of care which protects the child and their family from risks (violence, child labour, etc.) and supports their full reintegration into society (including school reintegration, access to safe employment, family reunification). In 2019, we protected and supported the sustainable reintegration of over 84,000 children, youth and caregivers, and over 200,000 more through partnerships.

From the start, Friends’ work was guided by listening to the voices of our beneficiaries, and they have been integral in shaping and adapting all our programs. Our social workers and community-based volunteers, many of whom come from the communities in which they work, build long-term, trusting relationships and act as counsellors, with each service user supported to choose the right services for them and to make all decisions about their future.

Through our ChildSafe Movement we reach a global community of millions of citizens, tourists, volunteers, businesses and other organizations, ensuring they are informed and have the tools to play their part in protecting children.

We have 25 years’ experience in ensuring that marginalized populations – street children, former prisoners and people with HIV – are provided with tailored, holistic support which addresses the entire spectrum of their needs, from psychosocial support to job placement - so that they can become fully independent, productive members of society. We elevate their opportunities so they can elevate themselves.

Through our ChildSafe Alliance, we elevate our partners’ capacities to replicate and scale proven solutions to child protection and reintegration. And through our ChildSafe Movement, we elevate global understanding of everyone’s responsibilities towards protecting children and building their futures.

It was 1994 when my friend Barbara and I arrived in Cambodia. 

It was a place of gunshots, roads with holes so deep people drowned in them during rainy season, war in the jungle and mines everywhere – my street was only de-mined the month I arrived. Most of all there was extreme poverty everywhere and overwhelming wealth for a few.  

One night I stumbled across 20 children sleeping on the streets, just as a big, expensive car drove by - this really upset me. How could we hope to rebuild a country where children - the country’s future - were ignored like that?

We started bringing them food and that’s where we met Mark. He too was trying to help, bringing rice to the kids. As we talked, we realized that between us and others, these children were getting up to eight meals a day... so our well-intentioned support was actually incentivizing them to stay on the streets.

I had to make a decision – stop, forget about it and go work in Japan as planned, or stay and build a constructive solution to these problems. I chose the latter, and Friends was born.

When I arrived in Cambodia, the plan was to stay for a few months. If someone had told me then that this country would become my home, I would found an NGO and social enterprise, meet my partner and raise a family here, I would have told them they were crazy.

So why did I change my life plan and stay? Firstly, I was disturbed by the contrast of donor 4x4s driving by as children begged, worked and lived on the streets. It might be a truism to say that children are the future, but I really believe that if children and young people are not placed front and center in countries’ development, such efforts are doomed to fail. And what I saw in 1994 was children being left behind.

Secondly, I wanted to address the huge inefficiencies and redundant activities provided by NGOs due to a total lack of coordination – my friends and I feeding the street kids eight meals a day was a microcosm for what was happening on a major scale. I had to do something to ensure that beneficiary voices were heard, that NGOs were communicating and coordinating and that well-intentioned efforts were actually effective.

My background is not necessarily one you’d associate with an NGO founder, and maybe that’s why it has worked. I studied Political Sciences at Sciences-Po Paris before being sent to work at the French Consulate in Osaka, Japan, and later to a radio and TV company. After three years working in Japan and traveling across Asia, I took a role at l’Oreal in Marketing and Sales in Paris, before deciding to return to Japan, stopping in Cambodia on the way.

That was my formal education, but what matters more is what I learned from the 25 years living and working in Cambodia - spending time with communities and understanding their wishes and needs, testing, improving and constantly adapting and building up Friends’ services. With an incredible team of social workers, vocational trainers and technical experts by my side, Friends is able to give hundreds of thousands of marginalized children, youth and caregivers the chance to redefine their futures. Seeing our services support street children to become chefs at 5* hotels, and sex workers empowered to leave prostitution to set up their own businesses, has been a truly humbling experience which I will never tire of.

It has been hard – I’ve had death threats from paedophile rings, been shot at and attacked – and I don’t think Friends or I would be where we are today without an ability to learn from failure, dogged resilience, and an unwavering belief in the potential of children and young people. 

Friends’ social businesses – our award-winning restaurants, shops, beauty salons and more – rely on tourism for most of our clientele. And with COVID-19, tourism has disappeared, and along with it a third of our income. I quickly realized that for us to survive and come out the other side of this crisis, gut-wrenching decisions would have to be made, and fast. So alongside the rapid implementation of protocols to keep our staff and beneficiaries safe, I found ways to cut our 2020 budget by more than a third – team restructures, pay cuts, furlough and sadly, letting many staff go. At the same time, I reached out to our donors, and was able to convince them to repurpose their grants towards our COVID response, giving us much needed financial flexibility.

Whilst the tourism sector has been decimated, I refocused our efforts on the local markets and new opportunities for training and job placement – for example, we have designed and produced new products including face masks to be sold in our shops, and we rebuilt our training restaurants with new menus, new pricing and new marketing strategies, allowing us to continue quality training and job placement of our beneficiaries. 

In 1996 I was attending the cremation of a boy we had been supporting who had tragically died of alcohol poisoning. As we stood at the temple, an ambulance pulled up, and the driver got out and threw a bunch of small packages in front of the cremation site. I counted more than 20 of these little packets and asked what they were. The driver explained that they contained the bodies of babies who had died of HIV/AIDS.

At that time, Cambodia had the highest HIV prevalence rate in Asia, but being faced with this scene was a wake-up call that no statistic could provide. I immediately began to look at available HIV services and saw there was almost no support for children and youth. So together with my team, we established Cambodia’s first ever HIV program for children – looking at prevention, education, care and support. We would become the first NGO licensed by the Cambodian government to provide syringe exchange services for injecting drug users, among whom HIV transmission rates are particularly high, and the government’s Strategic Plan for Illicit Drug Use Related to HIV/AIDS would draw heavily on the harm reduction system we had developed. 

Friends-International is an registered NGO and social enterprise.

Friends leads in testing innovative solutions to the problems we seek to address, learning, adapting and maximizing impact through scaling across our programs and replicating through partners globally. We pioneered the vocational training business model, creating for example the award-winning TREE (Training Restaurants for Employment and Entrepreneurship) brand, training marginalized youth and caregivers with the skills to gain dignified employment, whilst generating profits to reinvest in our work. The model became so successful that we franchise it out to other NGOs.

Much of our innovation stems from listening to service users and customers and being agile enough to test solutions in response. For example, our ChildSafe Experiences were born from the identified need of tour companies for services that positively engage their clients with local communities. The value and innovation of the Experiences are multiple: they provide ethical alternatives to harmful ‘voluntourism’; they educate travelers about their role in protecting children and give ways to engage with our work; and, they generate revenue which we can reinvest to reach more children.

We work on the basis that we must collaborate and partner within and across sectors and societal actors to achieve our mission. Engaging and involving actors for whom child protection may not be their primary concern involves understanding their needs, and devising mutually beneficial solutions so they can play their role in protecting children. Understanding the crucial role that governments must play, we work alongside them, building capacity at all levels to enhance national child protection systems.

Friends’ theory of change is based on three observations: 

1. There is an overall lack of quality and innovation in NGO service provision that fails to adequately respond to changes in marginalized populations and environments in which they operate. Many are still strongly rooted in charity models which create dependency;

2. There is a plethora of organizations operating in the same geographical areas with similar target groups – this leads to overlap of services, competition for access and resources and an overall waste of resources and time, ultimately hurting the people they are trying to serve;

3. There is a global lack of involvement of the wider community in child protection, either because they do not know what to do, how to react or simply do not believe that they have a responsibility, which increases vulnerabilities for children, youth and their caregivers.

To respond to these issues and achieve our goal of protecting marginalized children, youth and caregivers and supporting them to build their futures, Friends has developed three tiers to our work:

1. Our holistic range of protection and reintegration services including harm reduction, education, vocational training and job placement. Services are constantly adapted to the changing needs and contexts of the populations we serve, and we encourage replication of best practice models through partners;

2. The ChildSafe Alliance – a network of 58 partners coordinated by Friends, collaborating and coordinating to improve overall service quality and maximize impact by working together;

3. The ChildSafe Movement – our global movement which aims to involve all actors in society to recognize children at risk and respond appropriately through information, behaviour change campaigns and targeted communications.

Through these areas, Friends has protected and supported the sustainable reintegration into society of well over half a million of the most vulnerable children, youth and caregivers, and millions more through ChildSafe partner replication. ChildSafe Movement campaigns including ‘Children are Not Tourist Attractions’ and ‘Don’t Create More Orphans’ have reached tens of millions of people globally and contributed to policy change and collaboration with government on reintegrating children from institutions into family based care. 

In 2019, Friends services benefited 84,432 marginalized children, youth and caregivers, with services including school reintegration for out-of-school children, vocational training and job placement for marginalized youth and caregivers, protective actions for children in danger or suffering abuse, and harm reduction services including the distribution of clean needles for injecting drug users. Through the activities of our 58 ChildSafe Alliance members, a further 209,519 beneficiaries were supported. Furthermore, through the ChildSafe Movement, we reached over 7.5 million people worldwide with messages about keeping children safe, and 17,325 children were directly protected by the actions of ChildSafe community-based volunteers and through calls to our ChildSafe Hotlines.

At the present time, whilst the needs of our communities of operation are growing, we face drastic reductions in our annual budget due to COVID-19, which will lead to an overall reduction in our reach in 2020. This is where the Elevate Prize could play a crucial role in increasing our impact through financial support, visibility to attract further funding and significant global growth in the reach of the ChildSafe Movement’s campaigns, messaging and impact.

Five years from now, taking into account past growth but also the current context, we expect to Friends’ services growing to support over 150,000 children youth and families. And we have ambitions to grow membership of the ChildSafe Alliance to 80 global partners, and in collaboration with Elevate, to more than double the global reach of the ChildSafe Movement and protective actions taken for children.

Over the next year we will:

• Support the protection of tens of thousands of marginalized children, youth and caregivers across Southeast Asia from the health and socio-economic risks in the post-COVID context by adapting our services and delivery   
• Develop education and training programs aligned to new realities and able to rapidly adapt to changing needs (e.g. mobile education, online job readiness training, new employment opportunities)
• Adapt business plans, marketing strategies, services and price points of our social businesses (including restaurants, beauty salons and shops) to the new context, targeting a local rather than international/tourist-based market, to strengthen our financial sustainability post-COVID-19 
• Inform and mobilize a global community of organizations and at least 9 million citizens with the knowledge and tools to play their role in protecting children and supporting their wellbeing in the new context

Over the next five years, we will:

• Continue to scale our tried-and-tested services through building the capacity of our NGO Partners and Government service providers, supporting them to replicate our protection and reintegration models
• Grow our community of child protection best practice through recruiting new members to the ChildSafe Alliance
• Continue to mobilize all actors in society through the ChildSafe Movement, adapting our tools and campaigns in response to changing trends and challenges in child protection
• Work towards our goal of financial self-sufficiency through expanding our offerings in child protection consultancy, continued innovation and adaptation of our social businesses and franchising our methodologies and models. 

The biggest challenge we face is COVID-19 and the fact that it is simply not possible to forecast with certainty how the pandemic will evolve, and as such what the social, economic, legal and health landscape will look like in our countries of operation and globally in the months and years ahead.

Whilst at present, COVID cases are in decline and government restrictions are gradually being eased in Southeast Asia, even a low-level second-wave of infections could lead to the reinstatement of government-mandated protective mechanisms including lockdown, closure of educational institutions etc. This will cause further socio-economic damage, worsen the situations of our beneficiaries and place limitations on our ability to deliver services.

COVID-19 is rolling back progress that we have made for children’s safety, rights and development not just in Southeast Asia, but globally. And at a time when our services are needed more than ever, the global economic downturn and disappearance of foreign customers for our social businesses means our financial sustainability has, for the time-being, been seriously compromised. Moreover, many of our donors are suffering, and we have seen $1 million in grants being cancelled/suspended as a result.

Friends faces the additional challenge that we operate in countries heavily neglected or forgotten by much of the donor community, with many institutions and large INGOs who previously funded us pulling out of the region or cutting their funding. As countries increasingly turn inwards to deal with the fall-out from COVID-19, this is only set to get worse.  

During the first wave of COVID, we developed and rolled out SOPs led by a taskforce who closely followed international guidelines and local realities to ensure the highest levels of protection for beneficiaries and staff (resulting in 0 COVID cases), and to minimize any possibility of transmission. This included remote case management and distribution of hygiene materials and protective equipment. SOPs are now being adapted but would be immediately reviewed and reinstated in the instance of new cases.

We continue to carry out regular context analyses looking at social, economic, governance, legal and health contexts which may require adaptation of our services, in areas including: employment market analysis such as new and emerging recruiters and skills alignment; potential/actual government regulations on movement and safety protocols in the instance of new cases; and changes to education systems. Systems and protocols have been tested and are in place to ensure all our services can be carried out virtually in the case of recurring lockdown in a way that ensures the safety of staff and beneficiaries.

The Elevate Prize could be a crucial partner in supporting Friends to be flexible in its responses while rebuilding and expanding our social and financial sustainability and impact for the most marginalized children, youth and beneficiaries, as well as elevating the impact of our ChildSafe Movement’s behaviour change and information campaigns to ensure that at a time of heightened risks for children, millions more people are reached with messages about how to keep children safe.

Friends fosters genuine partnerships at every level of our work in order to advance our aim of ensuring all children and young people are protected and able to pursue their right to a safe and productive future. In Cambodia, in partnership with the Cambodian Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans and Youth Rehabilitation (MoSVY) and UNICEF Cambodia, we founded and lead the 3PC, a national network of child protection NGOs coordinated by Friends to support learning, best practice and replication of solutions. And through the ChildSafe Alliance, we partner with 58 NGOs and government services to coordinate, support best practice and collaborate to increase our collective voice and impact.

Through the ChildSafe Movement, we build partnerships with businesses including hotels, airports and tour operators, as well as schools, local authorities and many others, training and certifying them as ChildSafe organizations, with tailored support to design child protection policies and child protection training for staff.

Our vocational training models are frequently designed in partnerships with sector leaders – for example our hair salon curriculum was supported by Wella and we are currently partnering with Shiseido to review and upgrade our Beauty training program.

Furthermore, in order to ensure that the youth and caregivers we train are then able to access job placement, we have built a network of hundreds of Futures Employment Partners, ranging from small mechanics workshops to major international hotels, who provide internships and job placements for our graduates. 

Before COVID-19 hit, over a third of Friends’ revenue was generated through our vocational training businesses including our restaurants, beauty salons and ethical shops. All our businesses provided high quality vocational training for vulnerable youth and caregivers in the real-work setting of successful restaurants, shops, salons and more, whilst also providing high quality services to customers, generating revenue to be reinvested in our work. Trainees are supported to complete the training with a holistic array of other support services tailored to their individual needs, including psychosocial support, safe accommodation for those living on the streets, health support and more.

COVID-19 has meant we have had to temporarily and in some cases permanently close these businesses and we know that for the remainder of 2020 and likely well into 2021, we will no longer be able to rely on tourism as a core market. We are therefore developing strategies for how we will repurpose our training restaurants, shops, beauty salons and other businesses to cater to new market conditions, looking at a predominantly local and Asian clientele and the expat community. We are revising business plans, marketing strategies and services (including design of new restaurant menus, beautician/stylist offerings, products in shops etc.) and price points in line with local tastes and expectations, and will need to identify and access donor funding to support the reopening and operational costs of these businesses, which will be loss-making in their first year.

Friends works with a hybrid model – combining donor funding with an ambition to maximize our sustainability through self-generated revenue, which has predominantly come from our training businesses, but also from consultancies to other NGOs, institutions and donors, franchising our models and other smaller initiatives like our ChildSafe Experiences, allowing us to self-generate 38% of our income 2019. Our social business income has been drastically impacted by COVID and by our current projections, we do not expect them to return to profitability before late 2021 at the earliest, and for some it will take even longer. In the interim, we will have an increased dependency on donor funding. We have a small fundraising team based in Phnom Penh and Jakarta who manage a diverse portfolio of donors including foundations, individuals, corporates and institutional funders, and who have been actively prospecting for new opportunities emerging in the COVID context, as well as an active board of trustees who have been able to make some high-level introductions to other potential supporters.

We are also developing our online marketing strategies so that in the absence of significant tourist footfall, we can still reach these markets (who are generally willing to pay higher mark-ups for services) with sales of our products. Strategies include building more interactive online content, including ‘how tos’ on making some of our products, launching our brand on Etsy to grow our international client base, and growing our network of wholesale clients through a more proactive marketing and communications strategy. 

Past financial statements showing all sources of revenue can be viewed on our website at https://friends-international.org/financials/ 

In 2020, the impacts of COVID-19 have meant we have had to make budget cuts of 36%.

At a time when our self-generated revenue has all but disappeared and we have seen the cancellation or suspension of grants totalling over $1million, Friends is urgently seeking funds to respond to the needs emerging due to COVID-19 in our target populations, including huge growth of unemployment pushing more families into poverty, and an increase in child protection concerns both in our communities, but also across the globe.

We will need to access significant additional funding to be able to enact our strategies for re-opening our adapted social businesses and vocational training programs for vulnerable youth and caregivers in this new context, as well as to adapt and expand the reach and messaging of the ChildSafe Movement, at a time when lockdown and school closures are putting hundreds of millions of children at heightened risk of exploitation and abuse and hindering their development.

As of July 2020, our estimated budget for 2020 is $5.1 million, reflecting a 36% cut from our pre-COVID budget. This does not reflect the true scale of our ambition for the year, but rather the realities of the current financial context, including reductions in donor and self-generated income. Regular analysis and reforecasting will continue to take place and depending on the success of our fundraising efforts, this figure may evolve. 

This partnership with Elevate could have a transformational impact on our ability to address the immediate and longer-term challenges COVID-19 presents and reach our goals for children:

• Significant, flexible financial support, as well as access to additional funding opportunities, comes at a time when we are urgently seeking funding to adapt our VT and social business models and rebuild our financial sustainability
• Tailored media and marketing support would significantly increase visibility of our work and impact, enabling us to attract additional funding and other paths to financial sustainability, including more opportunities for consultancy and franchising
• Access to Elevate’s network could support the growth of our ChildSafe Alliance and community of best practice, as well as the opportunity for sharing, learning and collaborating with the community with the potential for joint campaigning to elevate our voices for children
• It would also enable us to massively scale up the reach and global impact of the ChildSafe Movement, through access to new and wider audiences
• At a time when the importance of efficient online systems is increasingly important, both to keep costs down but also due to ongoing constraints on movement, technical advice/support to strengthen our online systems would be invaluable. Technical support and advice/collaboration with the community on moving into online business models so that we can still reach tourist markets who are no longer travelling to Southeast Asia, and advice/support on growing our access to these markets through strengthened systems, communications and marketing could also be a significant support.

In addition to the above identified areas, we would also value the Elevate Prize’s support in the following areas:

• Technical support and exposure to drastically scale up the ChildSafe Movement’s reach and visibility
• Linkage to the wider Elevate network for potential collaboration and heightening of impact through partnerships
• Collaboration to identify and develop new ChildSafe partnership models and ways to monetize these for financial sustainability
• Support for expansion of our ChildSafe client base through linkage to new actors and businesses
• Industry knowledge and research on projected impacts of COVID-19 and responding, with a particular focus on Asia
• Technical support to develop digital systems, solutions (including a ChildSafe app) and online business models
• Technical support to upgrade and enhance our Monitoring and Evaluation mechanisms

• Businesses with operations in Asia to collaborate with e.g. on our vocational training curriculums (especially in retail, digital, beauty, mechanics and hospitality) and to become job placement partners
• Regional employment networks to expand the reach and impact of our job readiness and placement programs
• Business consulting on new markets/changes in markets
• NGOs working in the child and youth protection and reintegration space to partner through the ChildSafe Alliance
• Organizations interested with an interest in becoming ChildSafe Movement partners
• Social enterprises who are successfully adapting their models to the new COVID-19 context, including through shifting to online business models.