Project L.I.F.E. Foundation

You're a village woman. There's never much money in your pocket, but you're used to that. You, your husband and children plant a few vegetables, have a few chickens, plant rice, and hope for the best. But the best doesn't come. The rice harvest fails, so your husband goes to Bangkok to get day labor work. He goes just for the dry season, but the rainy season comes and he doesn't come back. He never comes back, and you are now a village woman with a family and no husband. What do you do?

Ask any farming family in Thailand's poverty-stricken Sa Kaew province, and they'll tell you that's a normal story. Project L.I.F.E. Foundation’s Rural Women’s Development saw the need and, hand in hand with the village women, are solving the problem. Project L.I.F.E.’s Rural Women’s Development coordinator visits the villages, talks to the women, and asks how they would like to help themselves. The answers are different in different villages. Some plant vegetables, some make handbags, some do weaving, some raise silkworms,. Over 140 families have been helped so far. That’s what L.I.F.E. is all about.

Real L.I.F.E. story:

Pang isn't who she used to be. When the Coordinator from Project L.I.F.E.'s Rural Women's Development first met her, Pang was poor, desperate, and wondering if there was any way out of the cycle of poverty. That was 7 years ago. Now? Now Pang is a leader, helping others out of the poverty cycle that once enslaved her and her family.

With RWD's help, Pang became the leader of a women's group in her village. They decided their project would be raising silkworms and selling number one grade silk thread. The way wasn't easy sometimes, learning a whole new profession, but the RWD Coordinator was with Pang and her group every step of the way. It has been and still is one of RWD's most successful projects, so successful that Paeng and her husband have been able to buy 40 cows! To a Thai farmer, that is real tangible wealth.  But Pang has gone beyond that. She is reaching out to help others have what she has. In 2008, she worked with the RWD Coordinator to set up a seminar in her village of Nong Mek so farmers could learn how to improve the quality of the soil. From that seminar, her whole village has been impacted, with the village leaders setting up a special group to make and sell the organic fertilizer they learned to do in the seminar.  Pang's life has changed and it has changed her whole village. That's Pang. That's what L.I.F.E. is all about.

Contact Rural Women's Development