The Population and Community Development Association (PDA) was founded in 1974 as a non-governmental organization with the initial aim to complement the efforts of the Royal Thai Government in promoting family planning in Thailand, especially in areas where knowledge and access to services were scarce. Utilizing a participatory, community-based approach, PDA recruited and trained residents of villages and urban neighborhoods to provide information on family planning, including the supervised, non-medical distribution of oral contraceptives . This distribution network covered more than one-third of the country, thus contributing significantly to the decrease in the annual population growth rate from 3.3% in the mid-1970s to 0.8% in 2002. During the same period, the number of children per family fell from 7 to 1.6.

     After addressing the immediate family planning needs, PDA expanded its activities to include primary health care, HIV/AIDS education and prevention, water resource development and sanitation, income-generation, environmental conservation, promotion of small-scale rural enterprise programs, gender equality, youth development, democracy promotion. The most recent activity has been the post-Tsunami social, economic, and environmental rehabilitation of the villages affected by the Tsunami.

     Today, PDA is the leading and most diversified NGO in Thailand, employing over 800 staff members and working with over 12,000 volunteers . PDA has 18 regional development centers and branch offices located in 15 provinces in rural Thailand.

     PDA has pioneered sustainable grassroots endeavors, marked by extensive villager involvement not only as beneficiaries, but also as partners, planners, managers and leaders. PDA’s programs are based on the belief that local people are best suited to be an equal partner in shaping and sustaining their own development. Thirty-one years of PDA’s involvement has created significant change in the following eleven areas:

      • Health, AIDS & Family Planning
      • Income Generation & Poverty Reduction
      • Rural Microcredit
      • Water & Environmental
      • Youth as Agents of Change Today and Leaders of Tomorrow
      • Education & Nutrition
      • Corperate Social Responsibility
      • Emergency Relief Services (CBERS)
      • Asian Center for Population and Community Development (ACPD)
      • NGO Sustainability

     PDA and its leaders have been recognized internationally by various organizations for their work in making lasting, systemic changes in Thailand and Southeast Asia. Two of our programs have been recognized as Best Practices by UNAIDS, and recently the PBS television special, “Rx for Survival”, highlighted PDA’s pioneering successes in family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention and in the area of changing attitudes and behavior and delivering services to the rural poor. Representatives of organizations from nearly fifty countries have come to Thailand to learn from PDA’s successes through PDA’s international training arm. The most recent acknowledgement of PDA’s key contribution came from the World Bank, in November 2005, which estimated that seven million lives were saved from HIV/AIDS through the intensive public education and prevention program designed and introduced to the public through PDA.