She Calls Her Cashew Trees Angels
From first grant to private equity: how impact finance reaches farmers
Leng Lun (pictured) has been watching the same river his whole life. He is 65, a rice farmer in Cambodia's Kampong Cham province, and from the embankment where he sits, the Tonle Sap stretches a kilometre wide, speckled in both directions with plastic jerry cans in every colour, bobbing on the current, each one marking a fishing net beneath. Behind him, six thick electricity cables run from a concrete embankment down to a pontoon at the water's edge: the spine of a solar pumping station that delivers irrigation water to rice farming families here, including his own.
For most of his life, his two paddies might as well have been on different planets. The field nearest the river he always managed to irrigate, but the other was at the mercy of the sky.
Before, I used to worry so much about rain, because everything depended on it. If there was no rain, sometimes we'd wait a whole month, just worrying. Couldn't sleep at night, just thinking. Couldn't eat well.
Leng Lun
Now he gets two harvests, and that second one is what keeps him farming instead of looking for construction work. "If the price goes to 800 or 900 riel (~$0.21/kg), that would be okay," he says. "But at 600, I would have to go to be someone's labourer."
The pumping station behind him belongs to SOGE. Water is not the only problem. Elsewhere in the country, farmers are rebuilding soil exhausted by decades of chemicals, with biochar from HUSK.
SNV supports businesses at various scales along the 'impact capital continuum'.
In Cambodia's farming belt, where rainfall has grown less predictable and 90% of the country's 2,500 irrigation systems no longer function, and where decades of intensive farming have stripped soils of their fertility, SOGE and HUSK, two local businesses built agri-business models worth scaling. SOGE operates solar-powered pumping stations that deliver water-as-a-service to rice paddies. HUSK turns rice mill waste into biochar-based fertiliser.
But getting a good idea off the ground is one problem. Getting it to scale is another. Between those two stages lies the “missing middle”: enterprises with a working model and customers, but without access to the capital needed to grow.
The difference for SOGE and HUSK, and ultimately for thousands like Leng Lun, was the right support at the right moment. Two SNV-managed programmes – Innovations Against Poverty (IAP) and the Dutch Fund for Climate and Development (DFCD) provided it, sequenced along what we call the impact capital continuum.
The story of two inclusive businesses
SOGE's CEO speaking at an SNV-organised event on impact-driven finance in Cambodia.
SOGE was founded in 2014 by Thida Kheav. Most irrigation pumps in Cambodia run on diesel, but Thida started by selling solar-powered alternatives and, unlike most vendors, stuck around to maintain them. It was not enough. "The farmers don't trust solar because they have a bad history," Thida says.
So Thida changed the model: stop selling equipment, start selling water. SOGE would own the stations, farmers would pay per hectare. No equipment to buy, no repairs to manage. If a pump fails at two in the morning, that's SOGE's problem.
Innovations Against Poverty (IAP), funded by Sida and managed by SNV, provides early grants and hands-on guidance for enterprises at exactly this stage—the first rung of the continuum. For SOGE, a €200,000 grant—matched euro for euro from Thida's own savings—funded the first station where the company kept ownership and farmers simply paid for water.
Before this, banks thought the model was strange. She had to drive loan officers to a running station and let them watch farmers open valves and fields fill before they believed it. "I wanted to do this since 2017," she said, "but needed IAP to help finance the cost of the first station." Within a year, hectares under the new model more than doubled, from 500 to 1,200.
As a very small company, you don't have money to hire the most experienced people. IAP really guided us, helping us build a company properly. Otherwise, we wouldn't have made it.
Ingrid van Ginkel, HUSK General Manager
Every year, Cambodia's rice mills burn or sell mountains of husks as fuel. Either way, the carbon goes into the atmosphere. HUSK, founded in 2019, found a third option: heating those husks in low-oxygen kilns - a process called pyrolysis—that locks carbon into a porous black material called biochar that holds water and nutrients in soil for centuries.
For HUSK, the IAP grant arrived after COVID, which had nearly finished the company. "There were months that we ended with sixty dollars," says Ingrid van Ginkel, HUSK's General Manager. By the time IAP's money arrived, HUSK had a product and customers but lacked the systems to grow. The grant funded production equipment and put those systems in place.
Scaling has a way of turning solved problems into new ones
At one of SOGE's pumping stations, 27 rice farming families share a single branch of piped water. The agreement says five farmers draw water in rotation; in practice, 20 open their valves at once, putting pressure on the system. Sang Sinan (pictured), who farms two hectares nearby, kept his old petrol pump as a backup. "I never worried about water because we live by the river," he says. "Never worried. But now I worry because I depend on someone." Yet the hours the system saves him allow him to improve his property. He's frustrated and better off at the same time. Yousoh Lors, a former teacher who manages the station for SOGE, holds scheduling meetings. "But after you leave," he says, "they go right back to doing it their own way."
HUSK's friction is slower and more intimate. Cambodian households carry more than $18 billion in microfinance debt, the highest per capita on Earth, much of it borrowed against the very land they farm. The first season is the hardest sell. Biochar improves soil over time, but yields can dip before they rise—and for farmers carrying that kind of debt, that gap is a gamble. Sut Laim, a 42-year-old vegetable farmer, tried biochar on her cassava and watched her harvest drop 20 percent. "Waste of money," she says, and laughs. About 30 percent of new customers drop the product before the soil turns the corner. When crop prices fall, farmers treat biochar as a luxury and revert to cheaper chemicals.
She calls her cashew trees angels, and means it literally. "Gives magic to me.
Sen Yon
HUSK adapted. Their new products blend biochar with conventional inputs, using 30 percent less chemical fertiliser but delivering results from the first season. By year three, Sut Laim's soil was softer, her yields were up, and she was raising chickens and planning vertical farming racks. "Just be patient," she says. "The result will come. When I have more income, it inspires me to do more."
Ingrid compares what's happening underground to a destination hotel: "Nutrients check in, microorganisms follow, water stays, and before long you have a whole economy underground."
For those who stay with it, the soil has a long memory. Sen Yon, 55, widowed since 2010, farms five hectares of cashews and vegetables. Her first season using HUSK's biochar, her cashew harvest brought four million riel. The second: 20 million. The third: 30 million, roughly $7,300. "The leaves started to get very dark, dark green," she says. "I checked on the skin of the tree. It looks different from the neighbours'." She calls her cashew trees angels, and means it literally. "Gives magic to me."