Abstract
The outbreak of COVID-19 had caused businesses to shut down. As a result, unemployment incidences soared. Being unemployed not only affected ones’ incomes, Physical and psychological well-being were also adversely affected as well. These undesirable effects were more predominant among new graduates, unskilled workers, part-time workers and elderly workers. In Thailand, some of those affected were fortunate to be able to return to their original provincial residences. There were also those who decided to stay due to lack of jobs in the communities or nearby areas to support them if they were to return home. These lack of employment opportunity issues were known to the government both at the national and provincial levels. Thus there were several initiatives on area-based job creation project to ensure that those who returned would find an employment to support them until the breakout subsided. Many of these initiatives tided their program to the improvement of community well-being. While employment benefits were apparent, other indirect social and economic benefits were more subtle. Assessing the success of these publicly-funded programs based only on apparent employment benefits would grossly underestimate the programs’ contributions. This study aimed at providing a broader view as to how such initiatives generated both direct and indirect social and economics benefits. With the use of Social Rates of Returns (SROI) as the key empirical workhorse, the study provided supplementary information of the magnitude of programs’ contributions whose values could be used as financial measure against the resources spent on the program; therefore, the benefit and cost ratios would be closer to their true boundaries. Five projects were chosen as case studies. SROI calculation based on primary and secondary sources had yielded the followings: 1. For Khok Nong Na Sufficiency Economy project, the SROI was 1 : 4.23; 2. For 1 Subdistrict 1 New Theory Agriculture Group project the SROI was 7.13; 3. For U2T Project, the SROI was 1 : 5.15; 4. For Local Volunteer Care-Takers, the SROI was 1 : 3.55; and 5. For Traditional Thai Massage Training, the SROI was 1 : 22.70. By and large, based on the above empirical findings, it could be concluded that these initiatives were sound investment of the public fund. There were three essential lessons learned from these projects. The first being finding the right match between the project participants and the need of communities. It was found that when the skills of participants matched with communities’ needs, participants would receive considerably more support from communities; this would increase the chance of the participant to successfully meet the requirements of the project. The second lesson was designing exit strategy prior to the implementation of the project. There were cases whose community capacity deteriorated significantly after the project participants were withdrew. This would not had happened if there were properly designed exit strategy to pass on all the responsibilities held by project participants to the designated persons in the communities. The third lesson was on enhancing participants’ soft skills, digital skills and communication skills so they could work more effectively with community members. This skill enhancement should be part of the pre-project orientation of the participants. The last one was integrating monitoring and evaluation process as a part of the project. This was because the project of this nature required certain time period before outcomes and impacts could be felt and measured. Without having a proper M&E process, there would be no way to collect required data to measure the true success of these endeavors.
