Community Development Thailand LTDRegistered

The organisation is in the process of establishing an expert advisory panel that will guide the charity in selecting benevolent partners in Thailand to work on funded projects. That said, it is anticipated that the main targets will be poor families in rural villages in North East Thailand, where poverty is concentrated. When possible, the charity will aim to address the causes of poverty rather than the effects of it. Major wealth disparities exist in Thailand, which appear to be secondary to its economic and social institutions. How will we help: Significantly our charity s work will be distinguished from other charities in four important ways (1) how we gather detailed evidence on the barriers to wealth creation both at an individual and family level (using adapted life history interviewing techniques), and at the village or community level by mapping conventional and cultural approaches being taken (2) the application of decades of behavioural science research to inform how participants should do things differently (also drawing on leading behavioural scientists internationally), (3) take a think small approach to improving the way things have been done in the past, not by introducing big new ideas but rather by making a series of small changes which, when added together, may have sizable impact, and (4) testing (i.e., evaluation) rigorously whether or not the changes made are actually making a difference. That is, a scientific and finegrained approach (drawing on the academic experience of the CDT directors and other stakeholders we have engaged via fundraising efforts) will be taken to changing the behaviour of people stuck in poverty, which then can be used if there are opportunities of scaling up activities with government assistance. These approaches are inherently time consuming to develop, but if successful, will be more applicable in the resourcestrapped village context. This think small manner of working is sometimes called the nudge approach to behavioural change (Thaler R & C, 2008) or marginal gains (Service O & Gallagher R, 2017; Halpern D, 2015), which has been successfully used in the United Kingdom, but as far as we know, not been applied in Thailand Number of people helped: provide developmental assistance to impoverished communities in Thailand and carrying out activities and projects to relieve poverty in those communities