Hahna KimJournal #1
My internship at the Population and Community Development Association (PDA) in Bangkok, Thailand is well underway. I am already in my fourth week and I cannot believe how fast time has flown. I am here with a graduate student from the Mailman School of Public Health. In our first week, we met with various members of the Corporate Social Responsibility and International Affairs Bureau (CIB), which is where we are interning. CIB is running PDA’s flagship program, the Village Development Partnership (VDP), which essentially allows donors to “adopt” a village and help eradicate poverty in that village. PDA likes to use the word “partner” rather than “donor,” because the mission of VDP is to help villagers establish sustainable business activities with the funding the partner provides. Last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded PDA with over $7 million to expand the VDP to an additional 52 villages in Thailand and 20 villages in Cambodia.
After the first week, we had a chance to visit northeastern Thailand, where the majority of the VDP activity is occurring. We took the trip with a group of MBA students from Sasin, which is the business school at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. They were all members of Sasin’s equivalent to the Social Enterprise Club at CBS. It was great to meet like-minded MBA students halfway across the globe!
Through this trip, I visited several different villages where I saw how the villagers were improving their quality of life and growing their income through silk-weaving, pig raising, etc. What I noticed, however, was that there was not a lot of cooperation amongst the villagers who were doing the same kind of business activity. In addition, they were predominately selling to the local community or had one-off buyers from Bangkok. I saw this as an opportunity to create a project for my internship. PDA has given me the flexibility and freedom to mold my own project. I proposed this project to the CIB team yesterday, and they gave me the go-ahead to do so.
For the next several weeks, I will be researching different community / group-based business models that have been successful in organic farming, silk-weaving, etc. I will also be visiting and meeting with groups in Thailand who are practicing some of these models to identify best practices that can be leveraged for the villages PDA is and will be working with.
Journal #2
I am sitting in the PDA center in Ban Phai, which is in Northeast Thailand. It is one of 18 regional centers. PDA Ban Phai is active in over 50 villages. Its two major activities are the Positive Partnerships Project (PPP) and the village pipe-water project. The PPP is a microfinance scheme whereby one HIV positive person is paired with an HIV negative person to engage in a business activity. They receive a loan together. The other project, I hope, is self-explanatory!
I came here on Monday and leave tomorrow to interview some different silk-weaving groups in the area that are not affiliated with PDA. I met with two yesterday, Silk Net and Prea Pan. Today, I met with Pan Mai. All of them are cooperatives but have different models. Silk Net has over 7,000 members from 110 villages. Clusters of villages specialize on different aspects of the value chain from cocoon production to spinning to weaving to making the finished products. An internal transfer price is set for each step in the value chain by a committee that represents all 7,000 members. Silk Net then takes the product and markets it to buyers. Prea Pan and Pan Mai use another model whereby each village specializes in a different product so when orders come in, the management team simply relays the order to the appropriate village.
The past couple of days have been quite valuable in identifying best practices that PDA can use to further strengthen the villages it works in, and hopefully I can incorporate these into my presentation at the end of my internship, which is only 6 weeks away!
Journal #3
I gave my final presentation today to Khun Mechai, who is the founder and leader of PDA, the NGO I am interning at this summer. (Side note: Khun is the respectful title equivalent to Mr./Mrs. in English and you use it with one’s first name only.) What I presented was a strategy proposal for a new business arm of PDA called BREAD (Business for Rural Education and Development). Khun Mechai is a strong believer in self-sustainability for NGOs so that the operations aren’t heavily reliant on donor funding. In order to do this, PDA has established companies to run its for-profit activities. This new company, BREAD, is another one of these companies. What I recommended is that in addition to its main mission, which is to generate profit that can then be used to support PDA’s development activities, BREAD can provide an additional benefit to Thai villagers by integrating them into BREAD’s supply chain activities so that it doesn’t have to go externally to meet its operational needs. It can, quite simply, leverage PDA’s extensive network. By doing so, it allows villagers to have a consistent demand for their products and services. BREAD also assists villagers by giving them marketing and product design training if need be. The end result is increased empowerment for the villagers. I conveyed this strategy through the example of how BREAD can start a rural tour business that operates socially-responsible and eco-friendly tours. I believe that the strategy and presentation was well-received. My final deliverables before I leave this Friday are to leave them with a survey for the target market and a business plan with details on how to move forward.
All in all, this was by far the best internship I have had. Thailand is a truly unique, friendly, and fun-loving country. PDA also embodies these characteristics as well. I really feel honored to have had this experience.
