Beneath the veneer of economic progress, poverty remains a widely-shared problem in the ESCAP region. Some 800 million people in Asia and the Pacific, about one fourth of the region's population, live below the poverty line. The great majority of the poor live in rural areas. Rural poverty is a direct result of unequal and limited access to productive resources, including land, capital and human resources. The poor, if not landless, often till low-quality soils, making their agricultural income often inadequate for a respectable living. Many have no access to formal credit and are therefore burdened with rising debt at exorbitant interest rates.

For various reasons, governments often have difficulty in providing the rural poor with basic HRD services such as education, health services, safe water and sanitation. Many poor people have thus been left illiterate and have few skills for productive employment.

Thailand provides an instructive example of the general situation. In Thailand, despite impressive economic development, poverty has persisted. As elsewhere in the ESCAP region, most of the country's poor are located in the rural areas, particularly in the dry and arid northeastern region, known as Isan.

In the last few years, a new and promising HRD approach to tackling rural poverty in Thailand has been pioneered by the Population and Community Development Association (PDA), Thailand's largest development-oriented NGO. Called the "Thai Business Initiative for Rural Development", or TBIRD, this methodology recruits private sector companies to sponsor HRD activities in rural areas. It was conceived partly in response to the predicament that, despite persisting poverty, years of strong economic growth had prompted foreign donor agencies to decrease their development assistance. New sources of funding, therefore, needed to be found domestically.

Since 1990, PDA has enlisted more than 50 multinational and local companies to commit themselves to the TBIRD concept, a process of development designed to improve the skills and knowledge of the rural poor, thereby enhancing both their income and quality of life.

The TBIRD initiative was developed by Mr. Mechai Viravaidya, PDA's chairman and a recipient of the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award. Recognizing that government and NGO efforts to raise the incomes of rural people were not succeeding, PDA enlisted the help of private enterprise. Not only could private companies use their entrepreneurial experience to help villagers identify business opportunities, they could also help villagers develop critically needed commercial skills, such as planning, financial management and marketing skills.

After six years in operation, the TBIRD endeavour has been recognized as a remarkable success. Incomes of villagers in various projects have increased substantially, sometimes spectacularly. Migration flows from some of the participating villages have reversed; migrants have returned to their home villages to take up attractive work opportunities. The Thai Government has endorsed the TBIRD methodology as one of several government-approved approaches to rural development. Outside Thailand, the approach is being replicated in neighbouring countries such as Viet Nam and Cambodia. ESCAP co-sponsored a seminar trying to seek ways of replicating the approach of involving the private sector in rural development in Sri Lanka last year.

As part of ESCAP's HRD programme, the ESCAP secretariat convened a training workshop in 1994 to consider the application of the TBIRD methodology in other countries in the region which face similar problems of rural poverty and rural-to-urban migration. Representatives from concerned government and non-governmental organizations from many countries of the region attended the Workshop on Promoting the Role of the Private Sector in Human Resources Development in 1994.

Based on the presentations and other materials prepared for that workshop, a book called "Business for Development - The HRD Approach of the Thai Business Initiative for Rural Development (TBIRD)" was published early last year (see our list of publications).

It deals with the experience of PDA in introducing, implementing and evaluating the TBIRD concept in rural Thailand, and includes relevant features of the TBIRD programme discussed in six case studies. It also contains guidelines to government and NGO personnel in setting up similar schemes in their own countries, based on the TBIRD experience in Thailand, providing ideas on how the private sector can play a positive part in rural poverty alleviation in collaboration with government agencies and NGOs.

See also the related interview with Mr Mechai Viravaidya, Chairman of PDA.

SEE OUR LIST OF HRD PUBLICATIONS FOR ORDERING INFORMATION