Rapid Response Campaign: Helping Cambodian SMEs Stay Safe Online During COVID-19

The Digital Asia Accelerator is a three-year USAID-funded pilot project working to advance digital literacy and cybersecurity in Southeast Asia and Mongolia and is part of the U.S. Government's Digital Connectivity and Cybersecurity Partnership. In response to USAID/Regional Development Mission in Asia's program design, DAI built an entrepreneurial and experimental project infrastructure that employs CLA approaches at strategic and activity levels across all program areas, including: continuous learning and improvement, adaptive management, and external collaboration. Specifically, the Digital Asia Accelerator project used these three approaches to respond quickly to a need identified early in the project's life in early 2020: helping Cambodian small- and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) stay safe online in the face of rapid digitalization and forced digital transformation due to COVID-19 outbreaks and restrictions. The Online Safety campaign videos that the Digital Asia Accelerator produced and distributed in coordination with USAID/Cambodia were viewed more than 890,000 times and reached 1.3 million users in Cambodia with simple and accessible tips and tricks, giving SMEs critical information about how to protect their businesses, their devices, and their data in the face of new digital security threats.   

DAA's CLA approaches helped the project: 

1) Develop a responsive new activity quickly to meet immediate needs from the SME ecosystem; and 

2) Build and test an operational model for early work in cybersecurity awareness raising that could be used in other DAA countries.