Self-negation and the belief in the noble principle of the dignity and worth of human beings irrespective of birth, sex, race, religion and other status, as well as the moral conviction to work for the improved welfare of humanity -- these were the ideals inherent in the Princess Mother, which emanated from His Royal Highness Prince Mahidol of Songkla, the Royal Father of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej. The Princess Mother's enduring determination to pursue her lifelong humanitarian and development work was also inspired by the course of action taken by His Royal Highness Prince Mahidol

The Princess Mother's love and study of philosophy. in particular, Cartesianism had endowed her with intellectual talent to determine the nature of the whole by separating it into parts and examining them methodically. as well as her ability to arrive at a methodical and systematic arrangement of separate elements to form a coherent whole. This explains the way in which the Princess Mother had conceived and carried out diverse activities to implement her vision through an orderly combination of related or successive programmes and projects so as to achieve the synergism of the various proqrammes of different types and nature.

The primitive living conditions and suffering of the people that the Princess Mother had seen in the remote, rugged, and isolated areas of the country, called her into action. The ultimate goal of Her Royal Highness's activities was to ensure not only their survival but also their self-reliant development and well-being. Although literacy itself is a necessity. it was obvious to Her Royal Highness that other needs have to be served: health care, medical treatment for the sick, skill training, apprenticeships, non-formal education programmes in health, nutrition, population and fertility awareness, agricultural techniques, the environment, and values and attitudes. Through her visits, showing attention and concern for their well-being, the Princess Mother also provided the much-needed moral support to the villagers, invoking a genuine sense of belonging, security and satisfaction.

The hallmark of the Princess Mother's many achievements in so many fields was her ingenuity and initiatives to do essentially what is needed most. The scope of her activities encompassed the mobilisation of financial and human resources, public, private and voluntary as well as innovation of effective and relevant delivery systems in order to provide services to meet the needs of the people in those areas. It was the unique ability of the Princess Mother that she managed with ease to secure the ways and means with the full and willing support and cooperation of all concerned.

The following are briefly the Princess Mother's three decades of continuous activities and achievements of international significance, which are linked to, and promote, UNESCO's objectives and missions:

Beginning in 1964, accompanied by Border Patrol Police units (BPP), the Princess Mother's extensive visits to the rugged, remote areas brought to her attention the lack of schools for children. The law on compulsory primary schoo!ing was at that time not applied to the remote areas. As a part of their civic action. the BPP had already built and operated a number of village schools since 1956, though these were of a makeshift nature, lacking facilities and below the normal standards. By her grace, all the BPP schools came under the patronage of the Princess Mother. Since then Her Royal Highness had generously given her own personal funds to gether with the funds presented to her by donors to establish hundreds of schools at BPP stations in the areas that previously had no schools. For each school built, the Princess Mother took the trouble of travelling to the remote village to inaugurate the new school and to give clothing, books, school materials, and toys to children, besides giving necessities and medical treatment to the needy. It was a part of her work to monitor the functioning and the outcome of the schools and to help solving the problems encountered. All of these schools under the patronage of the Princess Mother, were collectively known as the Border Patrol Police Schools. UNESCO International Literacy Prize Jury, on the occasion of the International Literacy Day, has awarded An Honourable Mention of the international Reading Association Literacy Award for 1989 to the Border Patrol Police Schools. The recognition was given, among other things, to the significant role of providing basic education to equip deprived groups, particularly highland minorities and people in remote areas, with literacy, communication and vocational schools needed to improve quality of life, self-reliance and participation in the community. There were altogether 670 BPP Schools in 1996, out of which 436 have already been transferred to the Ministry of Education.

While the basic learning needs of school-age children were being satisfied by the main delivery system of primary schooling, the Princess Mother perceived the necessity of providing a short-term supplementary programme to take care of youth beyond the school age. They had not had access to the school system and had no skills, nor work experience to realise their individual and community improvement. The logical and feasible solution conceived by Her Royal Highness was to launch a programme with special attention given to fostering intensive skill training for illiterate youth. Hence a crash functional literacy programme of eightmonth period was set up in 1973. This was under-taken by the Thai Hill Crafts Foundation, which was established in 1972 under the patronage of the Princess Mother For each training period a group of 20 hilltribe youth between the age of 12 to 20 were admitted with board and lodging at the headquarters of the Foundation in the provincial town of Chiang Rai. Besides reading and writing, the training programme focussed on attitudes towards work, which include cooperation, work performance, and self-reliance, as well as skill training in numeracy, accounting, trading, home economics, sanitation and family planning. The project served the purpose of empowering this group of young people to be self-reliant, to have capacity to work better, to continue learning, and to be able to live within the broader society. Funding support came from the Princess Mother herself, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and New Zealand Women's Club in Thailand. 

In 1979, the crash functional literacy programme was adjusted and named Hilltribe Youth Leadership to take care of bright young people between the age of 15 to 20 who had finished their primary schooling. The project was funded by the Princess Mother as well as by USAID. Housed in the compound of the Foundation. a group of 20 were selected each year to further the studies of their choice in general education, and technical or vocational training in various colleges. In addition, the Foundation provided informal education to foster the acquisition of human and civic values and attitudes required by human beings to be able to live and work in dignity, to develop their full capacities, to improve the quality of their lives, to make informed decisions, and to continue learning. It was the wish of Her Royal Highness the Princess Mother that education for children and youth should include the inculcation of normal values as well as civics and work attitudes.

In 1986, the Hilltribe Leadership Project was expanded and named Training and Development Project for Youth in Remote Areas. The philosophy and the nature of training remained the same. The expanded programme was intended to take care of youth from the hill tribes as well as young people from other remote areas in 8 provinces in the North of Thailand. There have been more than 300 beneficiaries from these training and development projects for youth from hill tribes and non-hilltribe communities, now working in different places in both public and private sectors. A number of them have returned to their home villages and participated in the development of their communities.

Her Royal Highness the Princess Mother was an exemplary personality in terms of her righteous conduct and noble character, of morals and ethics; and that was the way in which she had brought up her royal children. The Princess Mother saw the need to integrate ethics and values education as a component in training and education programmes for children and young people; and this, as indicated above, had been done in the training and education projects for children and youth undertaken by her. For the general public too, the Princess Mother, as a devout Buddhist, took up the duty of propagating the teaching of Buddha. by initiating Sunday morning half-hour radio programmes for spiritual revival. Her Royal Highness had outlined and published a Thai and English book entitled What Did the Buddha Teach ? written by a venerated monk, now the Supreme Patriarch. The book was very popular and widely read.

The Princess Mother realised that the income earned by the hill tribes from agriculture was inadequate, and also opium growing was to be stopped. On the other hand, production of tribal arts and crafts, if promoted, could be an additional source of income. Moreover, tribal cultural heritage should be preserved. For this reason, the Thai Hill Crafts Foundation under the Patronage of the Princess Mother was set up in 1972. The Foundation encouraged quality products, purchased the works, and took care of the marketing both inside and outside Thailand. The operation at the beginning was confined to Chiang Rai and later extended to Chiang Mai, Phayao and Mae Hong Son. The project was a great success. By 1980. with the ever-increasing market demand and the hill crafts production becoming a profitable enterprise, the Foundation had attained its goal as laid down by the Princess Mother. In 1985, the Foundation's objectives were reformulated to deal with the problems of environmental degradation as well as rural poverty. The objective of conservation of cultural heritage was maintained, but was extended to cover indigenous cultural heritage in other areas of the upper northern region. With that change of its thrust, the name of the Foundation was changed to The Mae Fah Luang Foundation under the Patronage of Her Royal Highness the Princess Mother.

To the Princess Mother, educational development for the disadvantaged and their health care are two sides of the same coin. Seeing how unnecessarily people in the remote areas were suffering from ailments without modern medical treatment, Her Royal Highness founded her famous The Princess Mother's Medical Volunteer (PMMV) in 1969. This was registered as a foundation in 1974, known as The Princess Mother's Volunteer Flying Doctor Foundation. In 1985 the Foundation 's instrument was revised to broaden the scope of its activities, with the substituted name The Princess Mother's Medical Volunteer Foundation (PMMV). The range of activities of PMMV cover 7 major types of work, including the Mobile Medical Corps and Radio Medical Service, which are pertinent to the matter under discussion. 

Mobile Medical Corps This is composed of mobile teams of doctors, dentists, nurses, pharmacists, health officers along with non-medical personnel, all of whom are volunteers from both public and private sectors. Mobile medical teams set out in the morning on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays by helicopters, boats and cars from nearby bases. In early years, travels by helicopters were more frequent, because many of the villages were inaccessible by roads. The villagers gathered in schoolhouses, open huts or vans for treatment. Afflictions ranged from the common cold. stomachache. toothache, diarrhea. intestinal parasites, diphtheria. and so on. For urgent cases. helicopters transported the patients to nearby hospitals. Those who required operations were either transported to a provincial hospital or even to Bangkok. Of course, all patients received free services. medicine. accommodation. and transportation. After one year from the beginning of the project. the mobile medical services of the Princess Mother’s volunteers reached all regions, covering 31 provinces. The activities and the benefits grew by leaps and bounds. In 1979 the mobile medical teams served 700,000 rural patients. From the initial 200 volunteers in the first year of operation. the number of volunteers in 1396 went up to 26.592 persons stationed in 50 provinces. At present the medical mobile teams are scheduled to visit the same villages 3 times a year.

Radio Medical Service Starting in 1973, this is a communications network system, which allows medics at outlying health stations to consult doctors at hospital stations for diagnosis of patients beyond their capacity. For instance, a medic can put an electronic stethoscope on a patient's chest so that a doctor at a hospital 30 kilometres away can hear the heartbeat and tell what is wrong with the given instructions on what to be done. Both the health station in the remote area and the hospital station are equipped with radio receiver-transmitters. In addition, hospital stations have handset modules for doctors so that they can always be reached no matter where they are. This long-distance medical service, which covered 25 provinces, was very successful, and for this reason, in 1976 the Ministry of Public Health has adopted it for operation in other provinces where this service had not been available. By 1989, the medical communications network system operated by the Princess Mother's Medical Volunteer Foundation in 25 provinces comprised 244 health stations and 158 hospitals.

The unprecedented extent of the activities and success for improvement of the health of rural people in the remote areas was well known inside and outside the country. On 17 December 1990, Her Royal Highness The Princess Mother was awarded the Health-for-AII Gold Medal by the World Health Organization. The Princess Mother was the first personality in the history of WHO to receive the award in recognition of the outstanding contributions of Her Royal Highness to advancement of social goal of health for all by the year 2000.

The Citation in part reads:
Her Royal Highness understands well that health for all encompasses both mental and physical well-being. Thus Her Royal Highness has taken under her guidance and patronage such seemingly diverse and unrelated entities as the Ananda Mahidol (Education) Foundation, the Foundation for the Welfare of the Crippled, the Foundation for the Promotion of Religious and Humanitarian Activities, the Thailand Leprosy Foundation and the Planned Parenthood Association of Thailand. All these organizations have one goal in common for Her Royal Highness, that is, furtherance of the health care and general welfare of her compatriots.

The most significant of the many activities initiated by Her Royal Highness the Princess Mother is undoubtedly The Princess Mother's Medical Volunteer Foundation (PMMV), which grew out of the famous The Princess Mother's Volunteer Flying Doctors ' Foundation. The main mission of the PMMV is to give medical care to people who. because of remoteness or inaccessibility, cannot be reached by existing medical and public health agencies. Through her concern for these people Her Royal Highness has come to be regarded as the mother of rural medicine. The annual visits of Her Royal Highness to such remote places. many located in border areas. as well as her personal supervision of the affairs of the PMMV. have proved to be a strong incentive to physicians. dentists, nurses, public health officials and other health personnel, and even members of the public. in volunteering their time to enhance the well-being of the less fortunate inhabitants of the country.

Doi Tung Development Project was conceived and initiated by Her Royal Highness the Princess Mother in 1987, 5 years before the Rio Summit on Environment and Development (1992), and 7 years before UNESCO's MOST (Management of Social Transformations) programme was initiated in 1994. Her Royal Highness the Princess Mother conceived the development of the mountainous Doi Tung areas in terms of integrating the improvement and protection of its environment with the social and economic development of the hill tribes living there.  It was, indeed, an innovative action-oriented project at that time.

Managed through the Mae Fah Luang Foundation under the Patronage of Her Royal Highness the Princess Mother, the Doi Tung Development Project is a multidisciplinary programme of action, requiring the collaboration and concerted actions of several government agencies and NGOs, especially the Princess Mother's Medical Volunteer Foundation. It is mainly government-funded development project of thirty-year-period, comprising 3 phases: phase l,1988-1993; phase II, 1994-2002; and phase lll . 2003-2017.

Objectives of Doi Tung Development Project

Consistent with the policy of Her Royal Highness the Princess Mother, the objectives of the project are as follows:

1. To reforest in such a way that allows people and forests to co-exist;
2. To improve the environment by recreating a mix of species as in natural forests;
3. To improve the social and economic conditions of the people living in the Project area;
4. To develop Doi Tung area to be prosperous and plentiful;
5. To make Doi Tung a strategie centre for the North of Thailand and to improve the security and well-being of the people in the area; and
6. To find a systematic method of rural development that can be applied in other areas throughout the region facing similar problems of poverty, opium production and addiction. and environmental degradation.

Main Lines of Action during Phase l,1988-1993:

1. Reforestation and rehabilitation of the degraded environment;
2. Development of infrastructure and public utilities;
3. Job and skill training;
4. Education;
5. Health care and family planning;
6. Cultural preservation;
7. Security in the Project area, and
8. Drug rehabilitation.

Results of Implementation of Phase l,1988-1993: