EPWF’s long history in water related issues

Water has been a concern of EPWF from its beginning. One of the projects approved by the board at its second annu  al meeting in October 1969 was proposed by Founding Director M.R. Seni Pramote and involved the digging of 10 water wells in the northeast at a cost of 500,000 Baht. Similar small projects followed over the years.

EPWF returned to work in the villages in Amphoe Nangrong Buriram Province in 1999 and our experience, both with Suksapattana and EPWF shows that a constructionist learning approach can be successful with villagers. It is a highly productive way for villagers to approach their problems and devise possible solutions as individuals and also at the level of the village. Importantly, the constructionist approach of setting ideas and plans on paper promotes clear project definition and transparent budgeting for projects, in other words good governance.


In one prime example, the villager is able to summarize his economic activity in the past and his future plans with management planning tools and the use of computer technology. He was able to greatly increase his income by good planning and hard work whicCash flow reflecting actual results for four years and projections for 2 years. Na Mao is a rice farmer who supplemented his income by casual labour. After he had access to water year round and used management planning tools, he was able to plan and record his income and costs.h enabled him to provide for his family and the education needs of his children up to university level.

The way ahead ...

EPWF believes that the model it has developed has enormous potential for bettering the lives of Thais in all parts of the country. Apart from the underlying and pervasive importance of elimination corruption and promoting good governance, we think the way ahead has one major challenge and one major opportunity.

The way ahead ... the challenge of local development officers (LDOs)

Local development officers are a key aspect of the program. At this early stage, it may be too much to ask villagers as individuals and as a village group to learn and practice all the management skills and to develop computer literacy. In the case of water resources management, engineering skills are also transferred from partner organizations such as Thai Oil Public Company Limited. LDOs learn at the same time as the villagers but they usually learn faster and retain more with more time dedicated to development work. When the facilitator leaves, the LDOs help the villagers consolidate their learning.

The challenge is recruiting, training and retaining competent LDOs to work with the villagers. The scarcity of suitable personnel reflects the poor state of rural education which, of course, is one of the root causes for low incomes and scant opportunities in the Northeast. Apart from considerable skills in constructionist learning, LDOs also need advanced skills in human relations in a Thai social setting. It is not easy for an LDO in his or her 20s or 30s to facilitate a villager in his 40s or 50s with 20 years of farming and village management experience .

EPWF had employed numerous local development officers on full-time and part-time basis; the challenge remains finding and retaining staff. Presently we have one full-time staff supported by two part-time locally and one part-time staff from Bangkok. Mr. Bangkok Chowkwanyun, EPWF General Manager and Director, spends about one-quarter of his time on this flagship program. Supporting this core team and increasing it on a long term basis are the essential factors in the expansion of this program. The key is to support and promote a cascading growth of local development officers facilitating other local development officers.

The way ahead ... the opportunity of information and communications technology

The incredible growth and wide-spread popularity of handheld computer devices, such as ‘smart phones’ and tablets, along with the obvious power of social networking over the Internet, suggest there may be an enormous opportunity to leverage the financial and human resources available from EPWF and its private sector partners. Information and communications technology is key, not only in the application of constructionism, but potentially in establishing effective direct communication among villagers and between villagers and donors.

It is not too difficult to imagine a world in which villagers are connected in real time over social networks with other villagers, sharing knowledge of production and marketing problems and solutions developed through constructionist learning. Marketing through social networking seems to have great potential, especially if organic agriculture methods are adopted.

Indeed, one can even imagine direct contact between villagers in Northeast Thailand and ‘compassionate givers’ in Bangkok and even spread throughout the world. At some point perhaps the village or even individual villagers could begin to function as a micro-or nano-non-profit organization dealing directly with donors. Eventually villagers could take the responsible for obtaining a large portion of the funding required for their projects. But the underlying message always is that corruption must be eliminated for this bright future to materialize.

Links such as these will soon narrow the gaps among people, both in understanding and empathy as well as in material and spiritual wellbeing.

Water: An EPWF concern from the start - the historic background

The beginning phase

The interim phase

Water has been a concern of EPWF from its beginning. One of the projects approved by the board at its second annual meeting in October 1969 was proposed by Founding Director M.R. Seni Pramote and involved the digging of 10 water wells in the northeast at a cost of 500,000 Baht. Similar small projects followed over the years.

EPWF again became directly involved in village development from 1999 to 2003 through the participation of Mr. Bangkok Chowkwanyun, EPWF General Manager and Director, in theLighthouse Project of Suksapattana Foundation in Amphoe Nangrong Buriram Province, which used a constructionist approach.

The project team started work with Population and Community Development Association (PDA) headed by Mr. Meechai Viravaidya and later moved to be resident in Limthong village.

During these years, EPWF was able to understand the villagers’ needs for better management including accounting skills to control his farming “business” and debt management. Another learning point was the inadequacy of government funding for rural infrastructure investment and weak infrastructure project planning. This laid the ground work for what was to follow.

From 2001 to 2006, EPWF also worked on the education side of Lighthouse Project while keeping up with the Village Development Project and in touch with PDA in Nangrong. In 2002 and 2006, EPWF made two donations of 500,000 baht and 240,000 baht respectively through PDA for household water development projects. 

The development phase - integration with water management

From 2009, HAII carried on the program at Limthong and the three associated villages. In 2010, EPWF returned to the Limthong project with HAII to work on the management and good governance aspects. EPWF also continued the education program pioneered earlier. It was found that education teaching is in a very sorry state but constructionist teaching methods in a tutoring style on weekends had a great and ready impact on the students; the problem was continuity of both students and facilitators but even the very limited intervention can be worthwhile leading to at least two students attending university studying engineering and computer science where this would be deemed out of their consideration in the past.

In 2006, EPWF learned that the villagers at Limthong had a project combining with three other villages to make a large klong in association with Dr. Royol Chitradon of the Hydro and Agro Informatics Institute (HAII), Ministry of Science and Technology. EPWF recognized the opportunity to embed a villager management development program to blossom alongside the agriculture opportunities opened up by the new klong and made an investment of Baht 2.4 million in 2007 and 2008 for the training of local development officers as facilitators of the villagers and working capital for villagers to start their agriculture projects with the arrival of the klong. During these two years, EPWF learned about water management in the Northeast’s particular topography. At the same time, EPWF started to pioneer children’s education program in the village using the experience garnered at Project Lighthouse.

The expansion phase as a flagship program

From 2011, EPWF armed with management skills and a basic understanding of water resources assumed responsibility for both managerial and financial inputs, thereby making it one of our two flagship projects, and branched out in search of other development areas. By the end of 2013, EPWF had invested 5.5 million baht in water and village development program.

Premises and assumptions of Water Management and Village Development program

The Water Management and Village Development program is based on several interrelated premises and assumptions.

Agriculture: A viable option in the Northeast

Covering the “last mile”

Grass roots approach
                         ... by villagers ... for villagers

Agriculture, as opposed to manufacturing or services, will continue to be the core economic activity in the Northeast for the foreseeable future.

Agriculture in the Northeast can be made much more productive with better management of existing water resources. In spite of difficult topography and poor soil, a moderately productive agriculture is possible with applications of water in the right amounts at the right times over the growing cycle. The problem is not insufficient water; the problem is insufficient water management.

The way to increase incomes in the Northeast is by firstly raising productivity of existing crops and second by diversifying into higher value-added agriculture. Both are possible with better water management at the village and the farm level.

The information and communications technology (ICT) industry talks about the ‘last mile’ problem, or the difficulty of connecting the household or small business end user to the optical cable ‘backbone’ of the high speed digital network.

Water management in the Northeast has exactly the same problem. Water is often or even usually available within a few hundred meters of a villager’s field, but there is no way to move it to where it is required. In its water management activities, EPWF has focused on this ‘last mile’ problem. In some cases it is merely a matter of repairing or upgrading existing irrigation infrastructure. In other cases it may be necessary to dig a new canal. The constructionist learning method (see below) allows the villagers themselves to define the problem and to propose solutions, usually with assistance from the facilitator and technical inputs from our private sector partners.

EPWF believes - and has found to be true - that the villagers themselves are the best judges of what projects they need to improve their lives. This rural development program, therefore, is about people taking the initiative at a grass root level and learning. The curriculum is their planning, financing - with emphasis on the private sector - and implementing projects to improve their economic condition - initially with the help of EPWF and our partners. Using a constructionist approach to learning, villagers can define their problems and analyse solutions at the grass roots level in a transparent manner.

Constructionism for water management and village program

EPWF has worked in the villages since 1999 and our experience, both with Suksapattana and EPWF shows that a constructionist learning approach can be successful with villagers. It is a highly productive way for villagers to approach their problems and devise possible solutions.

One of the basic principles of constructionism is that projects must be able to be shared among learners and between learners and facilitators. Projects must be in a form that others can see and learn from. A further prerequisite is that the learners must have sufficient basic skills - primarily arithmetic - to enable them to work meaningfully on projects. EPWF has had to devise methods and techniques to meet both of these challenges in its Water Development and Village Development program. A powerful constructionist technique is a step by step approach ("the next step") starting from some skill or knowledge which the villager can master and moving in small manageable learning steps to reach the required skills and knowledge.

Graphs were introduced, first manually and then computer generated.
These steps enabled the villager to plan higher productivity agriculture in a holistic manner in accordance to the sufficiency economy farming concept expounded by His Majesty the King. Multi-cropping enabled the villagers to diversify the price and volume risks of agriculture products and to attain a higher level of sufficiency economy.

The possibility of encouraging villagers’ children to use their arithmetic and computer skills (through one tablet, one child), supplemented by basic accounting skills, to help their parents and the village community is also an option we are exploring.

Two areas need further development by villagers and EPWF. Firstly, visits were made to other farms to learn about new crops and farming techniques. More has to be learned. Secondly, marketing has to be addressed, including the possibility of higher value products in terms of crops and also in terms of less use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers for the health of consumers as well as the villagers. 

But... Elimination of village corruption is essential

There are numerous divisions in our nation at present. But perhaps the most pervasive is the one between good governance - transparency and honesty - and its opposite - lack of transparency and corruption.

Nearly 15 years of experience working in villages has shown, perhaps not surprisingly, that Thailand’s national disease of graft and corruption extends to the village level. The water management projects will work only if honest and upright village leaders manage the projects for the benefit of the many rather than for a few “leaders.” Honesty is an absolute necessity if villages and villagers are to attract direct support from the public.

Accordingly, the constructionist approach has moved beyond good project planning and budgeting to transparency for good governance. The original goal of the program for better economic and social conditions remains, but has expanded to include reduction of the national malaise of corruption by the people themselves working at the grass roots level.
The crux is finding the honest and upright village leaders to be examples for other villagers to demand good governance in their villages.

The private sector must be involved

No matter how well-funded or well-intentioned, the evidence is that large-scale government water management programs are not going to solve the Northeast villagers’ real problems. It is very difficult for an official in Bangkok to see and understand what the “last mile” really means on the ground in Nangrong.

Furthermore, “last mile” projects are usually relatively small, perhaps 0.5 to 1.0 million baht each. They seem insignificant when billions of baht are involved in a large scale, showpiece project. Even when funds have been allocated for village projects, the funds may not trickle down through many layers of bureaucracy to the tambol level where they are needed.

Accordingly, “last mile” water projects are ideally suited to the CSR (corporate social responsibility) activities of companies in terms of reasonable size but high impact. Apart from funding, companies are often in a position to provide essential technical assistance to the EPWF facilitators and to the village learners.

For example, in late 2012 Thai Oil Public Company Limited led in becoming the first major corporation to support a “last mile” project in Nangrong, Buriram which will be completed in 2013. Thai Oil and EPWF together developed a “three-person learning model” which emphasizes that professional civil engineers work together with the community leaders and with dedicated local learners in designing and executing successful projects.

A village has data ...
     but does not turn data into information

From memory... to paper... to bytes...
                                                                              From data... to information... to wisdom

To an outsider one of the most striking features of village life is that there is hardly any use at all of record keeping or documentation - everything is ‘in the head’. Even basic information such as the profitability of a crop is unknown, although the data on individual price and cost items are burned in the memory. As a result there is little planning and life is very much on a day to day basis.

Not using paper or its equivalent is obviously a serious limitation for good decision making. It is very difficult to compare in one’s head the relative profitability of three or even two crops over a growing cycle. ‘What if’ scenarios are nearly impossible to imagine without some sort of visual representation of alternative paths and outcomes.

Thus the first step was to encourage and assist villagers to take the conceptual leap of moving from a paper-less society to a paper-full one. Paper records allow the use of simple management concepts for project planning, cash flow and accounting, adapted to the requirements of the villagers. Basic management tools, such as a white board and projectors, are also introduced for sharing information and decision making. Accounting is needed for transparency. Finally, computer technology is used to increase productivity by making tedious manual planning computer efficient and practical. This initial work was funded by Suksapattana Foundation with Khun Bangkok Chowkwanyun as the facilitator. The Suksapattana Foundation was in turn initiated by EPWF.

Developing the village  means
                                     developing the villager

Basic skills

EPWF’s village development work started with individual villagers. Our facilitators tried to help individual villagers understand and externalize their problems, which related mainly to their agriculture livelihood and almost always dealing - or not dealing - with their debt. As is often the case, before the full power of constructionism could be brought to bear on the problems, the learners had to become familiar with some very basic skills.

The first step was to introduce simple accounting records to categorize separately expenditures for agriculture by plot by crop, for running the household, for education and for debt management. The next step was on the revenue side and consisted of planning multiple-crops planting and harvesting cycles - initially on weekly basis - along with cash flow analysis, including debt servicing. 

 

In brief, the villagers moved from a paper-less to a paper-full way of life which allowed them to use man agement tools adapted to the requirements of the villagers. At first, this was done on a manual basis on paper to obtain understanding. Later a spreadsheet computer program was introduced to manage a 52-week multi-crop planning cycle in an efficient and effective way.