"Debt Traps: Predatory Microfinance Loans and Exploitation of Cambodia’s Indigenous Peoples", 24 September 2025

Predatory lending by microfinance institutions in Cambodia is driving land dispossession and human rights abuses against Indigenous communities, Human Rights Watch said in a report ... The financial backers of the Cambodian lenders implicated in these harms include private investors, state development banks, and the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s private investment arm.

The 120-page report, “Debt Traps: Predatory Microfinance Loans and the Exploitation of Cambodia’s Indigenous Peoples,” documents that over-indebtedness among Indigenous communities in Cambodia’s northeastern provinces has led to coerced land sales, debt-driven suicides, food insecurity, and loss of access to health care and education. Cambodian microfinance institutions (MFIs) have routinely issued loans to Indigenous borrowers through credit officers and loan documents using Khmer, a language many Indigenous people do not understand, for amounts far exceeding their ability to repay.

“Cambodian lenders have marketed microfinance loans as a pathway out of poverty, but they have pushed Indigenous families into over-indebtedness,” said Bryony Lau, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “These loans have cost many people their land, their health, and sometimes their lives.”

… Human Rights Watch between February and October 2024 interviewed more than 50 Indigenous villagers affected by microfinance over-indebtedness in and near Cambodia’s Ratanakiri province. Their accounts were corroborated where possible with civil society groups, journalists, industry experts, and credit officers from multiple Cambodian microfinance institutions, as well as with written documentation including microfinance sector reports, internal microfinance industry data, and the borrowers’ loan documents and credit reports…

The microfinance institutions have accepted so-called “soft titles”—an informal but commonly used document issued by a local authority— overlapping with Indigenous collective land titles as collateral, despite protections for such land under Cambodian law…

The acceptance of these soft titles as collateral undermines the application process for collective land titles, …

Indigenous borrowers reported pressure from credit officers to sell their land and in some cases selling some or all of their land, fearing retaliation from lenders. These predatory lending and collection practices undermine Indigenous identity, livelihoods, and survival…

All stakeholders—including international investors, Cambodian regulators, and the microfinance institutions themselves—should ensure access to remedies that include debt forgiveness and substantive debt restructuring, as well as recovery of Indigenous land obtained through coerced land sales, Human Rights Watch said…