Phirum’s quest to relieve women from unpaid care jobs

Phirum Dyphan is a nurse and founder CEO of MUCH Mobile Healthcare in Cambodia. She is on a mission to unburden women and girls of unpaid care without sacrificing their ambitions and career goals.

“I saw how my mother struggled to keep up with her job while she dedicated bulk of her time providing care for my dad when he was sick of cancer. At the time, my three older sisters were studying at the higher institution of learning. The oldest had to drop out of school because my mother could not keep up with balancing paid work with care. I was fortunate to eventually obtain a degree in nursing, but not many girls have same opportunity as I did,” said Phirum.

Like her mother, Phirum has seen many women devote significant amounts of time caring for elderly family members who are chronically ill and not able to balance it with participating in paid employment, pursue education or training, or engage in other activities outside of the home.

“What if these family members can have a trustworthy healthcare professional support them to care for their sick loved ones? If my mother had received such help, would she have been able to sustain the education of my older sibling after the passing of our dad? These were the questions that inspired me to go all out to establish MUCH mobile health care” Phirum explained.

When the number of patients started increase, Phirum realized that she needed more than passion to lead her purpose driven business. She needed expert guide to scale. By joining the Oxfam PRISME programme in Cambodia, Phirum has received strategic planning assistance, impact strategy advisory, leadership support and business linkages to build up her skills to take her enterprise to the next level and raise funds. She successfully received seed funding from Oxfam’s Superstar Competition and a Japanese foundation to launch her inclusive business function at the provincial level.

Phirum has grown from being just a founder of a leading mobile health care service in Cambodia to inspiring a generation of young women who believe they can be more – pursue a career and rise to leadership.

In fact, women comprise 85% of her staff members and they represent 75% the senior management level positions. Phirum adds “I believe that to achieve gender equality, all hands need to be on deck to shatter every glass ceiling that limits women and girls from achieving their full potential in life”

Click here to read more about Phirum’s Much Mobile Healthcare business.