RACHA supports health professionals in conducting training of Volunteer Health Support Group (VHSG) in the catchment areas of many health centers across its target provinces. The trainings include HIV/AIDS prevention, and focus on the advantages of family planning (FP), short-term contraceptive options such as, pills and condoms and long-term options such as intrauterine device, voluntary surgical contraception, and Norplant. After training, VHSGs or CBD agents are able to promote and provide counseling/informed choice on FP to women their partners in the community. In addition, RACHA fosters active collaboration with CBD agents to implement monthly distributions at affordable prices to communities. The income from sales serve as incentive and reward for CBD agents to motivate and encourage active, frequent, and accurate health promotion. In RACHA’s previous projects, it worked with 6,764 VHSG that also take on the role of CBD agents in remote villages.

With its present the Empowering Communities for Health (ECH) project, RACHA supports the refresher training to CBD agents on family planning and counseling skills in coordination with provincial maternal and child health supervisors and health center midwives. RACHA team, provided technical support and conducted two days refresher training to CBDs on short-term FP methods (Combined Oral Contraceptive (COC), Progestin-only Pill (POP) and condom, recording and reporting system, FP counseling and promotion of long acting methods (LAM) and USAID FP compliance policy. The training objectives were to refresh the knowledge and skills in the provision of family planning (FP) methods, FP counseling, record keeping and reporting system, and referral system mechanism from village to the HC. The current use of contraception in Cambodia shows an upward trend. Use of any modern contraception method increased from 18.5 percent in 2005 to 27.2 percent in 2005. It increased further to 34.9 percent in 2010 and 38.8 percent in 2014 (CDHS 2005 to CDHS 2014).