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News/Event Item
Council Hosts Gates Award Winner Study Tour
March 3, 2008
 The Global Health Council Influentials Study Tour highlighted the work of the 2007 Gates Award for Global Health winner during a tour in Thailand Feb. 18-23. It focused on the work of the Population and Community Development Association (PDA).
Since 1974, PDA has helped improve lives and strengthen communities in Thailand through its innovative approach to community development that has benefited more than 10 million people. Founded by Mechai Viravaidya, the organization provides family planning services to many rural communities that were not reached by government programs at the time. It also worked closely with the Thai government to develop and implement a groundbreaking national HIV prevention program that led to a dramatic reduction in new HIV infections in Thailand, from 143,000 in 1991 to 21,000 in 2003.
In addition to health services, PDA’s comprehensive approach to poverty reduction addresses income generation, water resource development, sanitation projects, environmental conservation, and promotion of gender equality and democracy. Today, it employs 250 workers and more than 4,600 volunteers in 16 regional centers and branch offices throughout Thailand.
 Dr. Tanatat Puttasuwan, a member of PDA’s board of trustees and director of Corporate Social Responsibility, and Dr. Nils Daulaire, president of the Global Health Council, led the study tour. Participants included Margaret Lien and Lee Poh Wah of the Lien Foundation in Singapore, Dr. Susana Madarieta of the Department of Health of the Philippines, Michael Specter, a staff writer from The New Yorker magazine, Glenn Melnick, a professor at the University of Southern California and a consultant for the RAND Corporation, and Dr. Chea Samnang, director of the Department of Rural Development from the government of Cambodia.
After a day of background meetings in Bangkok, the group set off for a three-day excursion to the province of Nakorn Rachima in northeast Thailand. The province is the country’s poorest area; only 39 percent of households having running water, yet one-third of the country's population resides there.
Despite its initial successes with family planning and HIV/AIDS, PDA has shifted its model to bringing development to the rural poor through innovative income generation, occupational training, education and microfinance programs.
 On the first day, the tour’s participants stopped at a true PDA success story – a tree-farm collective that has become so sustainable that PDA is no longer involved in its day-to-day operations. This once-small rural village now exports specialty trees to South Korea, Singapore and sells to land developers and golf courses in Bangkok. The group saw how the villagers, formerly unsuccessful rice farmers, worked together with PDA, to form a collective, learn the species of trees to market, and take out microcredit loans from PDA to get the businesses going. That was 20 years ago, and today a successful and self-sufficient village is flourishing where the health of the villagers is sound and grandparents have the resources to send their grandchildren to school.
 Other sites visited were similar, but at different stages on their path to development. These included a village sponsored by Nike where villagers took out microcredit loans from their own locally run Village Development Bank (a PDA trademark program) to create enterprises such as baking, sausage making, noodle making and basket weaving. Most of these goods are then sold within their own community or taken to nearby markets, thus giving the whole village an economic infusion of cash. In this village, we were struck by the smiling faces of the proud business owners, many of whom previously had been day laborers or unskilled and unsuccessful farmers. These villagers are now true entrepreneurs. Even more striking, most of them are women, as was the elected president of the Village Development Bank.
We also visited a vegetable bank where a group of villagers have gotten together, again under PDA guidance and training, and begun to grow crops with a viable market on 15 plots of land. PDA trained them on what to grow and provided them with water for irrigation when the government did not. We met a husband and wife, 75 and 78, who farm their own plot and have been able to send their grandchildren to school from the profits they make. During this visit, our group had the unique opportunity to sit down and chat with the villagers about how their lives have been made better with the advent of this PDA program. All of the villagers stressed that their health has drastically improved. They are now able to travel the 6 kilometers to the district hospital when they are in need of care, and they are able to feed their children nutritious food.
 The tour also saw the work that PDA continues to do in HIV/AIDS when we stopped at a local secondary school in time to catch their semi-annual HIV/AIDS awareness and training day. The school is given materials and a curriculum by PDA and students then lead sessions with other students. After a warm welcome of traditional Thai dance, we were able to walk among the four break-out groups of students, who discussed difficult topics with confidence and ease. Topics ranged from the right age for sexual debut, to prevention of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, to demonstrations of how to put on condoms correctly. Again, we were struck by the fact that there were strong, young women leading each of these discussion groups, and that PDA had found a way to work with the curriculum and materials to help make the discussions fun and engaging.
Another program targeting HIV/AIDS, the Positive Partnership Program, requires a non-HIV infected person to partner with an HIV-positive person to set up and run a business. The pair receives a microcredit loan, and it becomes the duty of the non-infected business partner to help reduce HIV/AIDS-related stigma. We visited one such program, where we saw members of the partnership making potpourri and picture frames. Often in Thailand, once it is known that someone is HIV positive, he/she will lose a job and become outcasts. This remarkable program not only allows for self-employment but brings HIV-positive people back into the fold of mainstream society.
Along the way, study-tour participants were fully engaged and asked challenging and insightful questions. The group was full of energy and enthusiasm and not only learned, but managed to have fun doing it. Our hope from this special week we spent together is that others will learn from these innovative models for rural development and health and take these important lessons back to their respective countries.
Click here for more on the 2007 Gates Award for Global Health winner.
category: Global Health Council News : Announcements
contributed by Liza Nanni on 3 March 2008
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