"Joint Response to Open Letter on Microfinance Reports", 16 July 2020

We read your open letter addressed to our four civil society groups and published on the CMA Facebook page ...

We respectfully decline your request to change any of the three reports regarding human rights abuses in Cambodia’s microfinance and microloan sector. The information and individual stories in these reports remains accurate. We will continue to protect the privacy of people who have chosen to share their stories with us on condition of anonymity. We encourage you, and all interested parties, to read the reports in full to better understand their purpose, methodology, and findings.

Human rights belong to each and every human being, and human stories are the foundation of qualitative research. One of our jobs as civil society groups is to amplify the voices of people who are suffering human rights abuses and tell their stories to a wider audience, in the hopes of making positive change in society to prevent these abuses from occurring. We will continue to share those voices, even when it means highlighting human rights issues linked to the microfinance and microloan sector in Cambodia.

We take this opportunity to once again reiterate the calls and recommendations that our civil society groups have made to all microloan providers in order to prevent human rights abuses in the sector…