Abstract:
This paper presents the results of the village leaders? viewpoints as one part of the results of a research on the ultra-poor in the south of Thailand, revisited after 10 years since the original study was conducted in the year 2000. The original study was conducted in four provinces. The first two namely Phatthalung and Nakhon Si Thammarat were chosen to represent the Thai Buddhists and the others, Satun and Pattani were chosen to represent the Thai Muslims. For this study, only the results from the three provinces except Pattani are reported as it was difficult and dangerous to conduct fieldwork in Pattani due to the continued unrest in the area since 2005. The objectives of the study are to find out the changes of the poverty situation after 10 years and to see the impacts of the poverty reduction projects implemented by the government on the poor. The research methodology used both quantitative and qualitative methods. The same villages in the four provinces studied in 1999 were again chosen. In each village, five ultra-poor people and heads of the villages were interviewed. The poor were interviewed with the structured questionnaire with an open end question to obtain the causes of poverty. For the village leaders, the in-depth interviews with a set of 14 questions were used to find out their points of views on the impacts of the government’s poverty reduction projects, the overall poverty situation, the most needed assistance for the village and the poor and the opinions on the poverty reduction solution over the past ten years. The results show that the leaders emphasized the importance of the development of infrastructure (roads, pipe water, electricity, reservoirs). They were satisfied with the projects that involved participation of the villagers in the decision making process and implementation of the projects. They criticized the top down approach projects from the government. The needs assessment should be conducted before the implementation of the projects. They also thought that projects should be given serious follow up and evaluation to achieve good results. Even though some projects did not address directly the needs of the poor, they helped improve the quality of life of the poor and non-poor of the village.
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