BANGKOK: Six years ago, Somsak “Pai” Boonkam drew up a plan with two villages in northern Thailand for tourists to stay with local families and immerse themselves in hill-tribe culture. The aim was for the villagers to see some financial benefit from their country’s multi-billion-dollar tourism industry.
Pai was sure it would be a hit with tour operators in Bangkok — but he was wrong. “They weren’t even interested to go and inspect the places,” he said.
That pushed the former engineer, now 34, to set up Local Alike, a travel consultancy that promotes sustainable tourism in 70 villages.
“I grew up in the same situation where there weren’t many economic opportunities, so it attracts me to work for the people,” said Pai, who lived with his grandparents in a village in northeast Thailand until he was eight while his parents traveled in search of laboring work.
A growing number of young Thai entrepreneurs like Pai are getting involved in activities that have traditionally been the domain of the government and development groups — from providing water in remote communities to helping coffee farmers earn a fair income.
This new generation of business owners believes running companies that invest in tackling social and environmental causes is a better way to help than relying on donors’ whims.
“There are so many problems in Thailand that need to be solved,” said Pai. “I see (this as) the new pattern of doing business — doing good while making money.”
Half of Local Alike’s business units are now financially sustainable and it runs a development fund that supports local projects, he said.
Thailand’s transformation to an upper-middle-income country in less than a generation has lifted millions out of poverty, but inequality and deprivation persist.
Over 80 percent of Thailand’s 7.1 million poor people live in rural areas, and an additional 6.7 million are just above the poverty line, according to the World Bank.
The Southeast Asian nation of 66 million also faces serious challenges of environmental degradation and resource depletion caused by mass tourism, pollution, generation of waste and intensive farming, experts say.
Aliza Napartivaumnuay, 34, grew up in Kolkata, Rome and Seattle before moving back to Bangkok. She spent nearly a decade working in the retail supply chain before co-founding Socialgiver more than two years ago.
The online business offers deals on leisure services, including hotel rooms, restaurant tables and spa packages. The proceeds fund social and green projects, such as reforestation, children’s education and hospital beds for poor patients.
The idea was not to set up a business that spoke only to people who already care about such issues.
“We wanted to create something more inclusive and approachable by offering services users are accustomed to spending on,” said Aliza.
Many trace the birth of social enterprise in Thailand to the establishment in 1974 of Cabbages and Condoms, a successful Bangkok restaurant that funds sexual health education and provision.
But the concept only started gathering pace a few years ago, with incubators such as Change Fusion fostering start-ups.
Now there are businesses that enable blind children to learn using a special drawing board, or that train and employ people with disabilities. Others support widows and orphans affected by the conflict in southern Thailand, and use IT to help health professionals and charities develop mobile apps.
There are between 5,000 and 10,000 organizations in Thailand that fit the social enterprise model, said Nuttaphong Jaruwannaphong, director of the Thai Social Enterprise Office (TSEO).
Saks Rouypirom, 39, opened Broccoli Revolution, a trendy restaurant serving vegan, mostly organic food to help fund his non-profit Sati. Its projects include installing water filters in northern villages in partnership with US-based Planet Water Foundation.
“Sati means ‘mindfulness’ so it’s about being mindful of problems and solutions,” said Saks, who buys mushrooms for his restaurant from a street-child shelter and kale from farmers to whom he has provided the seeds.
“Being a business owner, you can make a conscious decision to support these causes,” added Saks, who was born and raised in the United States.
Still, for all the excitement about their potential, social enterprises face multiple challenges in Thailand, including a lack of regulation and limited access to finance.
It was “very difficult” to get investors on board to set up Local Alike, when they were told they would not see all the profits, said Pai. He received support from Change Fusion and entered business competitions to win funding.
In Thailand, companies seeking certification as social enterprises cannot pay more than 30 percent of their profits in the form of shareholder dividends, said TSEO’s Nuttaphong.
When Ayu “Lee” Chuepa wanted to help coffee farmers in his community earn a fair income, he had a hard time convincing villagers to work with him due to his youth and inexperience.
“My mother said that is to be expected. So I asked, ‘If you weren’t my parents, would you have joined me?’. They said, ‘Of course not. Are you crazy?’” he recounted, laughing.
Things have since improved. The Stock Exchange of Thailand, for example, now has an online platform that promotes investment in social enterprises.
But the public perception that such businesses offer lower-quality products still needs to be tackled, experts say.
“Since the beginning, I didn’t want to sell our products by making people feel pity. I want them to buy because they’re good,” said Lee, who belongs to the Akha ethnic minority.
He is now building his third branch of Akha Ama Coffee, with help from architects at Jai Baan Studio, another social enterprise that uses local resources and nature in its designs.
Lee hopes the division between social and traditional businesses will fade with time. “I want everyone in the world to be a social entrepreneur, doing good,” he said.
From tourism to coffee, young Thai entrepreneurs blend profit with social good
From tourism to coffee, young Thai entrepreneurs blend profit with social good
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
