PDA was founded in 1974 as the Community-Based Family Planning Service (CBFPS) to complement family planning efforts of the Royal Thai Government. By launching unconventional campaigns to spread the family planning message nationwide, PDA’s family planning volunteers made a strong impression. The key to their success was to appeal to the Thai sense of humour by handing out condom key chains at official dinners, selling T-shirts with light-hearted family planning slogans, holding vasectomy festivals in honour of the King’s birthday, arming police with condoms to distribute for a “cops and rubbers” project, and promoting condom use in Bangkok’s red-light districts. Using a community-based strategy, PDA recruited and trained respected members of villages and urban neighbourhoods to provide information and to distribute affordable contraceptives directly to their communities. This was a novel approach and differed radically from the physician or clinic-based system which had been used previously. Today, this community-based distribution network of family planning volunteers covers one-third of the entire nation, and has contributed significantly to the decrease in Thailand’s overall growth rate from 3.2% in 1970 to 1.3% in 1991. Moreover, through this network, PDA has gained the trust of villagers, enabling PDA to expand its program with greater ease. After addressing the immediate family planning needs, PDA expanded its activities to include primary health care, AIDS prevention, rural development, consultation services, training, and media development.
WWW site (in English and Thai) has information on PDA programmes.